• WesBanco Launches New Healthcare Vertical

    WesBanco Bank recently launched its dedicated healthcare vertical, under the leadership of Suzanne Myers as EVP-Commercial Healthcare Director, and is already off to the races with a handful of senior care transactions closed. The strategic initiative will provide financing across the continuum of care, including seniors housing, skilled nursing,... Read More »
  • LTC Properties Acquires Class-A California Community

    JLL Capital Markets completed the sale of Loma Clara, an 89-licensed-bed, Class-A seniors housing community in Morgan Hill, California. JLL’s Seniors Housing Capital Markets team marketed the property on behalf of the seller, Steadfast Senior Living, and procured the buyer, LTC Properties. The REIT acquired the community within its SHOP segment... Read More »
  • Not-for-Profit Divests Texas Standalone MC Community to Family-Owned Company

    Matthew Alley of Senior Living Investment Brokerage announced another Lone Star State deal, selling a 20-unit memory care community in Sugar Land, Texas. Built in 1998, the community was the only seniors housing asset of a not-for-profit organization, which decided to divest. It was 80% occupied but losing around $30,000 a year on $1.26 million... Read More »
  • Owner/Operator Purchases Vacant Community for Reopening

    Blueprint was engaged to market a 100-unit vacant assisted living community located 10 miles south of Cleveland, Ohio, that had been taken offline following operational challenges. The community sustained profitability during prior operations. Blueprint generated four competitive offers from sophisticated owner/operators with proven capabilities... Read More »
  • Frank Cassidy Officially Nominated as FHA Commissioner

    Frank Cassidy, most recently a Walker & Dunlop senior managing director of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Finance where he originated loans for multifamily, nursing home and seniors housing properties, has been officially nominated by President Trump as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the HUD. He... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Two Cheers for the SNF Rate Bump

60 Seconds with Swett: Two Cheers for the SNF Rate Bump

CMS came out with its final skilled nursing facility payment rates for fiscal year 2024, and the sector will benefit from a 4.0% net increase, or approximately $1.4 billion, in Medicare Part A payments. That is up from the initially proposed 3.7% net increase and reflects a 6.4% net market basket update to the payment rates. There were a couple of negative adjustments that brought the net rate increase down, including a negative 2.3% decrease as a result of the second phase of the PDPM parity adjustment recalibration. That reduction came as no surprise, as PDPM was meant to be budget neutral and has been a net-benefit to many SNFs since the 2019 implementation. But to the SNF advocates... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Two Cheers for the SNF Rate Bump

60 Seconds with Swett: What Still Needs to Be Done to Solve the Staffing Crisis?

Will the senior care industry ever solve its labor issues? Before the pandemic, overdevelopment led to high levels of staff poaching in certain markets and rising wages to combat it. Then the pandemic, plus the government checks that kept many workers at home, led to more severe staffing shortages and the necessity for temporary staffing agencies to fill the gap, at exorbitant prices. It was around that time when we hosted a webinar tackling the staffing crisis in senior care and the potential solutions, with panelists Barb Clapp, who had just taken the helm at Dwyer Workforce Development, and Steve LaForte of Cascadia Healthcare, which LevinPro LTC subscribers can watch here. Nearly two... Read More »
60 Seconds with Monroe: SNF Industry Needs To Police Itself

60 Seconds with Monroe: SNF Industry Needs To Police Itself

As many of you would suspect, I am no fan of New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James. She politicizes too many things and definitely has a partisan agenda, and one which I do not favor. But after reading through the 300-page court filing against Centers Health Care and related companies, as well as its owners, well, I found myself agreeing with her. The cases involve the poor “care” of residents in a few New York nursing homes, as well as the alleged misuse of $83 million of Medicaid and Medicare funds for other purposes, including, allegedly, the purchase of a large stake in the Israeli airline, EL AL. Money is fungible, and one cannot distinguish between cash from private... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Two Cheers for the SNF Rate Bump

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: Two Cheers for the SNF Rate Bump

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 »