• Community First Solutions Acquires Again in Ohio

    Ziegler was engaged by Marquee Capital, the real estate company affiliated with Marcus Investments, LLC, the Marcus’ family office, in the sale of its seniors housing community in Mason, Ohio. Built in 2020, BrightStar Senior Living of Mason sits on 3.2 acres with 41 assisted living and memory care units. The community was well occupied at 90%,... Read More »
  • Joint Venture Acquires Nashville Active Adult Community

    An active adult community in Germantown, Tennessee, found a new owner thanks to the team at Newmark. Built in 2020, Avenida Watermarq is a 161-unit, Class-A active adult community in an affluent suburb of Nashville. There are one- and two-bedroom options averaging 919 square feet per unit. Occupancy was 87%. Inspired Real Estate Partners and GEM... Read More »
  • Institutional Owner Divests Ohio Facility

    Evans Senior Investments arranged the sale of a skilled nursing facility in Ohio on behalf of an institutional owner looking to exit the market. The facility comprises 88 beds and 20 independent living units, which served as a referral source for the nursing home. The buyer was a regional owner/operator that is actively expanding in Ohio. This is... Read More »
  • Strawberry Fields Completes Missouri SNF Portfolio Acquisition

    Strawberry Fields REIT, Inc. announced that it completed the acquisition of nine skilled nursing facilities comprising 686 beds in Missouri for $59 million, or $86,000 per bed. The REIT completed the acquisition using cash on hand and the issuance of approximately $2.0 million in OP Units of Strawberry Fields REIT LP to the seller. Eight of the... Read More »
  • Macquarie Asset Management Launches Health Wave Partners

    Macquarie Asset Management, which has over 35 years of experience in the real estate sector and a current network of 15 specialist operator investments globally, announced the launch of Health Wave Partners, a seniors housing platform aimed at targeting investments in modern seniors housing assets alongside established operators. The platform... Read More »
Baier’s Brookdale Butcher Block

Baier’s Brookdale Butcher Block

On Friday the 13th (kind of cute, isn’t it), Brookdale Senior Living announced some major C-Suite changes, including the removal of Steven Swain as EVP and CFO effective February 24th, with the current Chief Accounting Officer taking over those roles while remaining the CAO. In addition, Kevin Bowman is out as EVP of Community Operations (basically the COO) effective January 12th. The two division VPs for the East and West will now report directly to CEO Cindy Baier. We are not sure what happened, but this seems a little like blaming these two senior executives for the 50% plunge in Brookdale’s share price as a result of the recent dilutive equity raise. We don’t know where this equity... Read More »
Omega Healthcare Investors Working through It

Omega Healthcare Investors Working through It

Omega Healthcare Investors just provided an operator update, and the REIT will be working through some lingering problems for at least another year, if not longer. Perhaps the biggest problem remains Maplewood Senior Living, a Connecticut-based provider of assisted living and memory care services that is located about 10 miles from our Connecticut HQ. We tried to reach out to the founder several years ago, trying to be “neighborly,” but our efforts were ignored. Maybe they could have received some good advice. The company’s initial developments were on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, in the high-income neighborhoods of Fairfield County. Now, these areas are known to be high-barrier-to-entry... Read More »
Brookdale Senior Living Reports December Occupancy

Brookdale Senior Living Reports December Occupancy

Sometimes no news is good news. After two straight months of declines, Brookdale SeniorLiving reported that December’s month-end occupancy remained flat with November at 78.1%.That can be considered good news since we are in the beginning of what could be a terrible fluand COVID season. In addition, weighted average occupancy remained flat from November to December at 77.0%,after dropping by 20 basis points in November. If they can hold the line for the next threemonths, the company could start to see some improvement in the second quarter. Weightedaverage occupancy peaked in October at 77.2%, while month-end occupancy peaked inSeptember at 78.4%. So far this year, after a dismal 2022,... Read More »
Welltower Controversy?

Welltower Controversy?

Back when Welltower announced its agreement to let health system ProMedica Senior Care off the hook with its leases for 147 nursing facilities, leases that were drowning in red ink for ProMedica, we joked about it because, 1) we had just written that not-for-profit ProMedica’s board could not let the red ink flow for much longer, and 2) the new joint venture partner called Integra was not one of the commonly known “Integras” in senior living or health care, and there are many of them. But we did discover the relationship between Welltower’s Integra and an entity called Perigrove, which claimed to be an institutional investor with years and billions of dollars of investments under its belt.... Read More »
Brookdale Senior Living Reports December Occupancy

Ouch…Brookdale Senior Living Plunges

How do you reduce the value of your company by 40% in 24 hours? Tell investors you are going to raise more capital after you told them in your third quarter earnings call that your liquidity was okay and you had no debt maturities until September 2024. That is what confronted investors this week. Brookdale Senior Living announced, and then priced one day later, a $125 million capital raise that left people wondering. It consists of 2.5 million units, priced at $50 per unit, with each unit including equity and debt (more on that later), and the proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, the ubiquitous catch-all from the legal team. Our first guess was that investors pummeled the... Read More »
A Successful Turnaround, Twice

A Successful Turnaround, Twice

We have always stated the belief that smaller providers are nimbler and more on top of operations at the community level. That being the case, they are usually better able to turn around operations of a struggling community. Not always, but they have a better chance. This should also hold true with turning around communities after COVID. Large companies such as Brookdale Senior Living, while steadily increasing occupancy, are still far below where they were before the pandemic. So here is a case study about two turnarounds with the same community. In May 2019, a small provider, Bloom Senior Living, purchased a 78-unit assisted living/memory care community in Kokomo, Indiana from Capital... Read More »