

Activists Strike Again, But Fall On Deaf Ears
You have to hand it to Jonathan Litt of Land & Buildings, he has not given up on the senior care sector. After going after a few provider companies in the pre-COVID past, he recently set his sights on Ventas. But, Big Deb did not quake in her heels. She never does. As is his way, Litt tried to get a position on the Ventas Board, and after meeting with two separate groups of directors, he apparently thought that he made a good impression and had swayed them. Wrong. Right after his March 7 letter to Ventas shareholders, Ventas announced the appointment of a new board member, but his name was not Litt. Extremely qualified, yes, but not Litt. In Litt’s letter, he indicated his “tremendous... Read More »A Conversation on the Bridge Lending Market with Oxford Finance
The industry is emerging from the pandemic, but new issues are always arising, so how are lenders reacting and how do they distinguish pandemic problems from provider problems? Ben Swett sat down with Kevin Harbour and Tracy Maziek of Oxford Finance to discuss the state of the bridge lending market in a rising interest rate environment. Read More »Brookdale Provides Update
Brookdale Senior Living just released its occupancy update for February, and our first take was that things need to be better than that. Then, we remembered our late 2020 analysis which showed that assisted living occupancy has never increased in the first quarter for each of the past 10 years. Therefore, we should not expect too much this quarter. In this light, Brookdale’s census outlook is not too bad. From January to February, the weighted average occupancy dropped just 10 basis points to 73.3%. Even better, the month-end occupancy increased by 20 basis points from the end of January to 74.4%. The problem is that census at the end of September was 74.2%, so we have seen little overall... Read More »
Welltower: Riding Out The Storm
There were no surprises in Welltower’s fourth quarter and full-year 2021 earnings report, which we suppose is a good thing. Could the seniors housing portfolio be performing better? Yes, but so could everyone else’s portfolio. The U.S. seniors housing owned portfolio (SHOP) has seen a slowdown in census increase, with no change in December, which followed a 50-bp rise in November and 30-bp increase in October. That results in 80 basis points of census increase in three months, compared with 260 bp in the third quarter previous and 280 bps in the second quarter. While there is some seasonality in that fourth quarter number, we also may have seen the end of the “post-lockdown” boost, or the... Read More »