Fourth quarter NIC MAP data for seniors housing occupancy had little good news before the flu season may decimate again.
We are going to have to wait until mid-February or so to start hearing how individual seniors housing companies fared with occupancy in the fourth quarter. Our guess, however, is that it will only go downhill from there.
According to NIC MAP, occupancy basically remained flat from the third quarter to the fourth, which was expected. But that means, given the bad flu season this year, the first half of 2018 could be pretty bad for occupancy. Without an increase in the fourth quarter, there may be a lot of ground that will need to be made up in the second half of 2018, which didn’t happen in 2017.
This has become a bad cycle – one step forward, two steps back – and it doesn’t help that assisted living construction as a percentage of inventory remained too high at 9.1% in the fourth quarter, with independent living at 4.7%. Is development really slowing down? To find out, join me tomorrow at 1 pm on our webinar as we discuss this as well as who is providing construction financing and at what costs and terms. See you then.
