• Ziegler Handles Providence Portfolio Sale

    The Ensign Group, Inc. has agreed to acquire eight facilities in the states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, subject to the completion of certain regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. This acquisition includes the real estate and operations and are being acquired from Providence Home and Community Care. The real estate... Read More »
  • Ignite Medical Resorts Acquires in Texas

    Blueprint was engaged by a Houston-based real estate developer and investment firm to facilitate the sale of a skilled nursing facility in El Paso, Texas. The facility had been leased to a subsidiary of Vibra Healthcare, a national specialty hospital and skilled nursing operator based in Pennsylvania.  Built in 2017, VibraLife El Paso... Read More »
  • Class-A Community Trades in Philadelphia

    Berkadia announced the sale of a Class-A independent living, personal care and memory care community in the Philadelphia MSA. It was built in 2019. Berkadia Seniors Housing & Healthcare, led by Managing Directors Dave Fasano, Ross Sanders, Cody Tremper and Mike Garbers, closed the transaction on behalf of the seller, a private equity firm.... Read More »
  • Wisconsin AL Community Changes Hands

    On the heels of his closing in Minnesota, Bob Richards of Senior Care Realty headed over to Wisconsin to sell a small assisted living community in Dane County. Built in the mid-1990s, the community featured 20 units and a mostly Medicaid census. But occupancy was 100%, and the community operated at a strong margin above 30%. That is impressive,... Read More »
  • Private Asset-Based Lender Acquires Two Senior Notes

    Blueprint facilitated the sale of two senior notes secured by 24 seniors housing communities. The portfolio of communities spans approximately 1,200 units across eight states. Prior to the sale, all of the communities securing the notes transitioned to a new, national operator as part of a larger corporate wind down of the borrower. Individual... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Q2:23 M&A Activity Rebounds Above 100 Transactions

60 Seconds with Swett: Q2:23 M&A Activity Rebounds Above 100 Transactions

The M&A market rebounded, sort of, in the second quarter of 2023, rising to 110 publicly announced transactions, compared with 99 in the first quarter. Considering the economic shock of fast-rising interest rates, and how many deals died in all stages of the transaction pipeline last fall, the volume was actually impressive. Most of the dealmakers we talk to say that their pipelines are healthy, albeit moving slower and with more difficulty than before. We are still way down from the 147 transactions recorded in the second quarter of 2022, which annualized would have resulted in nearly 600 deals for the year. But a lot has changed in a year, clearly.  We are missing the larger... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Q2:23 M&A Activity Rebounds Above 100 Transactions

60 Seconds with Swett: What Will the Boomers Want?

The baby boomers have been referenced as the reason for investors to enter the seniors housing market for more than a decade, even though we are still several years away from the front end of them aging into the vast majority of seniors housing communities. But there is no guarantee that boomers will move into seniors housing, especially if new tech can better solve for health care, activities of daily living, property maintenance and socialization in the home, not to mention economic factors that may prevent seniors from selling their homes or may impact their savings and investment accounts to render seniors housing services unaffordable to them. Beyond all that, what if the current... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Persistence of Higher Capital Costs

60 Seconds with Swett: The Persistence of Higher Capital Costs

After the Fed held interest rates steady following 10 consecutive increases but left the door open for potentially two additional increases this year, you can’t help but think, what has gone as planned, or as predicted, in the last several years? Very little, unfortunately. Inflation has persisted in the economy, and rates will have to remain elevated for longer than earlier projections. Sounds a little familiar to the overly optimistic predictions of a seniors housing occupancy and margin recovery, post-pandemic, which is taking longer to materialize, and may never happen in many markets. We’re just saying that a little more conservatism may be needed in people’s projections or proformas... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Persistence of Higher Capital Costs

60 Seconds with Swett: Supreme Court Decision Hits Public SNFs

So much of the ire against skilled nursing facilities (personal, political and in the media) has been directed towards privately-owned facilities, and mainly their ownership those they deem as “private equity”, because of their great sin of caring for nursing home patients at a profit, and often not even at one. However, a recent Supreme Court ruling is now opening up public SNFs to the threat of lawsuits on the basis of civil rights violations. After the wife of a patient with dementia in a county-owned SNF in Indiana sued alleging he was unnecessarily chemically restrained and  involuntarily transferred without their consent, which would be violations of the Federal Nursing Home Reform... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Persistence of Higher Capital Costs

60 Seconds with Swett: Welltower Increases Guidance

Welltower came out with a business update for June, and there was some good news on the financial front, particularly in regard to labor cost trends. First, the REIT was able to raise guidance for both its 2023 net income attributable to common stockholders and 2023 normalized FFO on the back of better-than-expected operating results in its SHOP portfolio and a bolstered balance sheet.  Operationally, the REIT reported that same-store RevPOR continued to grow at a faster rate than ExpPOR in the first quarter of this year, the fifth consecutive quarter of margin expansion. This was helped in part by agency labor expense as a percentage of total compensation dropping to 3.4% in the first... Read More »
60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: A Win For Providers

60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: A Win For Providers

We all know that the Life Care Centers of America nursing home in Kirkland, Washington was the location of the first major SNF outbreak of COVID at the beginning of the pandemic. Well, the families of two residents who died sued the facility, the management company and some employees for negligence. As I have stated too many times, this early in the pandemic no one really knew what was going on, no one understood the severity, and no one knew what to do with the early cases, if they even had test kits, and to be held liable for deaths in those early weeks did not seem to make sense.  While the jury found that the company was not at fault for the deaths of the two women, the jury found... Read More »