


Acquisition Market Remains Strong
Transaction volume is still running ahead of last year’s record, fueled by liquidity and low interest rates. As of yesterday, seniors housing and care acquisition volume was still running ahead of last year’s record-setting pace. We are well over 300 transactions so far in 2019, and September is already looking to beat last year’s September, with several days to go. The question still remains, how long can this go on? The simple answer is as long as liquidity in the market remains at current levels. And that liquidity will remain as long as returns stay higher than alternative investments. They have, and low interest rates have not hurt. The other question is, when will the slow... Read More »
The Brookdale/Land & Buildings Saga Continues
Many of you may have seen Brookdale Senior Living’s proxy statement filed in response to activist shareholder Land & Buildings’ efforts to put former HCP CEO Jay Flaherty on the company’s Board of Directors, presumably to further its own demands to split Brookdale into an OpCo and PropCo in order to “maximize value for all Brookdale shareholders.” All we can say is, well done to Brookdale and CEO Cindy Baier for standing up to this pressure. We can’t say that we have always supported the decisions made by Brookdale executives and the Board, starting with its acquisition of Emeritus Corp. in 2014. Many pages in The SeniorCare Investor over the years have been dedicated to this topic. We... Read More »
2019 NIC Takeaways
The record crowd of 3,300 attendees were mostly positive about the market despite the headwinds. After spending four days last week in Chicago with my 3,300 best friends, my one big takeaway is the continued positivity that brought a record crowd to NIC. Not everyone was positive, but more capital keeps coming into the sector for a reason, even though returns have softened. One topic that kept on coming up was that new development is beginning to slow. But what many people forget is that a national statistic has little meaning for a particular market. Some areas are slowing down because they got way overbuilt, but others keep on chugging along, like Sarasota, Florida, despite the... Read More »
Welcome To NIC
As more than 3,000 people descend on NIC in Chicago this week, we hope talk will also focus on operations and ideas and not just investments. Good luck with that one. If you can believe it, this is my 29th consecutive Fall NIC Conference. There may be 15 of us who can claim that. But boy has it changed from the days they were trying to educate capital so money would be invested in senior living. Today, there is certainly no shortage of capital. While NIC is known as a deal-making conference, there should be a lot of other things on attendees’ minds. Are they talking about affordable senior living? What about penetration rates, which seem to have stalled in the 10% to 11% range? We assume... Read More »