Seniors Housing Occupancy Still Not Strong Enough
The third quarter showed some positive movement for seniors housing occupancy, but not positive enough, especially with construction starts. Well, well, well, what are we to make of the third quarter occupancy and construction stats that came out from NIC last week? The good news was that sequentially, occupancy at stabilized assisted living properties increased by 25 basis points to 90.5%, but was still down 68 basis points from a year ago. That means that the summer uptick that we had been hearing about may not have been as strong as many had thought. One issue we have is that the third quarter sequential occupancy growth for the top 99 MSAs was at the low end for the past seven years,... Read More »The Buzz at NIC
With record attendance (again), the buzz continued to be positive, despite some looming concerns. Well, what can I say after my 25th annual NIC conference? I could talk about the record number of attendees, the building, buying, investing and financing buzz. But did anyone notice, just one block from the hotel, the vacant lot for sale with banners waving in the wind, proclaiming “Senior Living Site Available.” I’m not kidding. People were there to do deals, make new contacts and expand existing ones, and for the newbies, to try to get a better understanding of the seniors housing and care sector. But the NIC organizers had a new program, called NIC Talks, and for this conference the theme... Read More »Riding Into NIC With A Market Disconnect
With the 25th annual NIC Conference upon us, the public markets seem to be crashing, and Brookdale Senior Living will be topic number 1. If you can believe it, this will be my 25th straight NIC annual conference. Yes, every one of them since the first one in Washington, D.C. when there were maybe 500 attendees. I happened to be one of the plenary speakers, giving the state of the skilled nursing market report. The funny thing was, the NIC organizers had to send someone to “check me out” to see if I was legit. Well, I hope over the last 25 years I have been successful in establishing my legitimacy. But you never know. As we all arrive today in Washington, perhaps the biggest topic will be... Read More »Being Large In Seniors Housing
Size isn’t all its cracked up to be, and it does matter whether you own or operate the real estate. We always hear that size matters, but it can also work against you. While no one has claimed to be able to define the optimal size of a seniors housing company, I have yet to hear anyway say that they would be comfortable running a company with more than 500 properties. Most would say that 250 would be tops, with many of them even much smaller. I am talking about owning and operating, with the emphasis on operating. For REITs, I don’t know if there is a real number where their efficiencies get maxed out. They are not hiring the staff and serving the food. And they are not trying to... Read More »Seniors Housing And The Flu
This past flu season has been blamed for many of the current seniors housing occupancy problems, but it has been bad for three years. When looking at the decline in seniors housing occupancy over the first two quarters of this year, much was made of the unusually severe flu season. While we are sure some companies and individual communities were hit particularly hard by this past winter’s flu, Barclays came out with an industry report which included a very interesting graph. It depicted the percentage of visits for influenza-like illnesses reported by the U.S. Outpatient influenza-like illness Surveillance Network. Yeah, I had never heard of that one either. Anyway, it did show that there... Read More »Schedule a demo
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