Brookdale Senior Living recently held its annual meeting of shareholders, and Beth Mace was voted in as a new member of its Board of Directors. Not only that, but she received more votes than any other nominee (157,658,156), and fewer “against” votes than any other nominee.
As readers know, we have complained that for many years Brookdale’s board has lacked any outside directors with any real knowledge of the seniors housing business, and now they have one. Beth recently retired as the head of research at NIC, and had been responsible for providing financial data to the industry to try to help investors and lenders understand certain dynamics, and how those dynamics have been changing.
Brookdale has been an underperformer ever since it bought Emeritus a decade or so ago. Coming out of the pandemic, its census growth has been below the average for the industry and has yet to reach 80% portfolio wide. We hope Beth will be forceful in expressing her opinions as to how to improve operations, census and profits, and will help management avoid poor decisions, such as the Emeritus purchase (made under the previous management). And the good news is that it looks like she will be getting a nice jump in compensation.
Good luck Beth, we will be rooting for you.
