The brevity of Brookdale Senior Living‘s occupancy update said a lot: there was not much good news to report. After eight consecutive months of increases, month-end occupancy decreased by 20 basis points from 74.5% in October to 74.3% in November. There could be numerous reasons for this, from the Omicron variant to the onset of the flu season to a staffing shortage, but demand clearly did not overcome these factors in the month of November. And these headwinds are not getting better anytime soon. Brookdale expects to continue publishing monthly occupancy through December 2021 reporting, so we could learn whether this decline is a blip or a trend.
Brookdale did see an increase in weighted average occupancy from 73.3% to 73.5%, month over month, which represented the first month of positive year-over-year weighted average occupancy growth since the pandemic began. But that increase is the most modest since March 2021. In the end, the senior care industry, and Brookdale in particular, cannot afford to face a census setback. That is because it puts pressure on companies to make even larger gains in future months, when “pent-up demand” from the pandemic is almost surely entirely spent, in order to get back to a stabilized level of occupancy and cash flow.
