• Berkadia Announces Array of Closings

    Berkadia is riding a transaction hot streak, closing 19 property sales in the last 45 days. The activity included a portfolio featuring five assisted living/memory care communities across Utah, Wisconsin and Minnesota sold to Jaybird Capital, an affiliate of Jaybird Senior Living, through HUD assumptions. Jaybird assumed management of the... Read More »
  • Tremper Capital Group Closes Several Financings

    Tremper Capital Group showed off its variety with a series of financings closed for clients across the country. They included a construction loan, an acquisition loan, a bank refinance and a portfolio financing. First, the team closed non-recourse construction financing for an assisted living/memory care community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.... Read More »
  • Upstate New York SNF Trades Between Not-for-Profits

    Joe Knapp of the Knapp-Stahler Group at Marcus & Millichap handled the sale of a skilled nursing facility in upstate New York. The Center For Nursing And Rehab in Hoosick Falls, New York, comprises 82 beds in a single-story building that sits on four acres. It was built in 1954, but renovated in 1979 and 1995.  Apparently, the facility... Read More »
  • Acquisition Financing Closed for Distressed California Community

    Private debt fund and direct commercial real estate lender Wilshire Finance Partners closed an $8.15 million first lien bridge loan for the acquisition and repositioning of a distressed seniors housing community in California. The financing included reserves specifically allocated for capital improvements and operational support during the... Read More »
  • Developer and Operator Secure Construction Financing

    Another new development will soon be underway, with BLDG Real Estate and The Fellowship Family securing financing for a $100 million full-continuum community, Fellowship Wildlight. BLDG Real Estate is a real estate development firm that specializes in design, development and asset execution across multiple product types. The Fellowship Family is... Read More »

Kindred Healthcare Sells SNF Division To BlueMountain

Kindred Healthcare announced an agreement to sell 89 skilled nursing facilities with 11,308 beds and seven assisted living communities with 380 licensed beds for $700 million, or $59,890 per bed. In today’s world, that can be considered cheap, since it is nearly 40% below the average price paid per bed in 2016, but there is more to it than meets the casual eye, since there is a group of leased facilities outside of the Ventas-owned properties that will be purchased from Ventas as part of the larger transaction. However, occupancy stands at 78%, which is below the historically low current national average of about 82%. The buyer is private equity firm BlueMountain Capital Management, LLC,... Read More »
Jump In Senior Care Deal Volume

Jump In Senior Care Deal Volume

The dollar value of announced seniors housing and care acquisitions in the second quarter was more than six times the first quarter. I hope you all had a happy 4th of July and got to stretch it into a four-day weekend. We are now in the mid-point of the year, and while transaction volume may have slowed a bit, the investment dollars are picking up steam. After a slow first quarter based on announced seniors housing and care acquisitions totaling only $1.4 billion, the second quarter has seen a significant spike to more than $9.6 billion in deal value. That’s the highest quarterly level since the third quarter of 2014. Admittedly, 65% of the dollars committed last quarter involved just two... Read More »
Evans Senior Investments Handles Texas Transaction

Evans Senior Investments Handles Texas Transaction

Evans Senior Investments closed yet another Texas transaction this year, a month after closing a three-property, 221-unit assisted living portfolio sale there for $45 million. The firm represented an institutional group based on the East Coast in its divestment of a 77-unit assisted living/memory care community in the town of Missouri City (Houston MSA). The purchase price came to $14.35 million, or $186,000 per unit, which is below average for the sector, especially for a new community (it was built in 2010). However, this is where the issue of overdevelopment may be having its effect. Since opening, the community has averaged just 79% occupancy, albeit with a 100% private pay census. The... Read More »

Paying Up For Square Footage In Skilled Nursing

The size of a skilled nursing facility can have important ramifications for the services they provide, especially as many facilities are engaging in higher acuity services and more frail patients. Four-bed wards and even triples became a thing of the past (mostly) more than 10 to 15 years ago. You need a lot more room to provide quality therapy programs, and with increasing demand for private rooms, or at a minimum large semi-private rooms, small facilities on a square foot per bed basis have become less desirable in the market, both for buyers as well as consumers. Most nursing facilities built today have at least 400 square feet per bed, and often much more. But in the past, many had 250... Read More »
Focus Healthcare Partners Closes New Dedicated Fund

Focus Healthcare Partners Closes New Dedicated Fund

Just eight years ago, Curt Schaller and Paul Froning formed Focus Healthcare Partners LLC to parlay their investment and financing expertise into an investment platform to buy senior living properties across the country in partnership with private equity capital sources. Since then, they have purchased 16 properties for more than $400 million, and have sold eight of them at what we believe to be a tidy profit. Several months ago, they decided it was time to form their own fund and went into the market seeking about $200 million. Apparently, they underestimated themselves and their track record. Focus recently closed on a $312 million discretionary real estate fund that will focus on the... Read More »
Enlivant Expands In Midwest

Enlivant Expands In Midwest

Enlivant expanded its presence in the Midwest with the acquisition of four senior living communities in Indiana (3) and Iowa (1). Ben Firestone and Michael Segal of Blueprint Healthcare Real Estate Advisors represented the publicly traded REIT in its strategic exit of the assets. A national operator (which we believe to be Senior Lifestyle Corporation) also handed over the operations to the buyer, Enlivant. Built in the late 1990s, the four assisted living/memory care communities range in size from 35 units to 62 units, totaling 175 units. And although they were nearly all private pay, each community could improve their occupancy. That will be Enlivant’s task, which already has an existing... Read More »
Evans Senior Investments Handles Texas Transaction

Alley Sells In Knox City

Senior Living Investment Brokerage’s Matthew Alley, always active in Texas, added another sale to his resume, this one in the rural central Texas town of Knox City. Built in the 1960s, the facility featured 66 beds on 2.12 acres. It was losing money on about $1.7 million of revenues at the time of the sale, which was not helped by its 68% occupancy. The buyer, an independent owner/operator based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, will focus on improving census and operating efficiencies. A local owner/operator sold it for $1.295 million, or approximately $20,000 per bed. With hard work, a profit can surely be made. Read More »

The Price of Age in Seniors Housing

Largely, the relationship between the age of a seniors housing property (including assisted and independent living) and the average price per unit is a near-perfect correlation, as the newest communities tend to sell at higher prices than the older ones. That was not the case in 2016, which saw its oldest properties jump in price and its newer ones fall, compared with 2015. Communities built earlier than 2001 (the tail-end of the assisted living building boom) sold for $179,900 per unit, up from $153,800 per unit in 2015, according to The Senior Care Acquisition Report. The anomaly of the year occurred in the group of properties built between 11 and 15 years ago, which sold on average for... Read More »
Jump In Senior Care Deal Volume

SNFs, Medicaid and Healthcare Reform

Whether the House bill, the Senate bill, or anything that may come out of reconciliation, Medicaid reimbursement for SNFs is going to get squeezed. It is amazing the uproar, first over the House healthcare reform bill, and now the Senate bill. I have to admit, like Nancy Pelosi, I have not read either bill, and I also prefer to wait until something actually becomes law to see what it says. Will the ACA replacement cut Medicaid spending over 10 years by $834 billion in the House bill, or $772 billion in the Senate bill? Will the ranks of the uninsured grow by 23 million by 2026, or 22 million? Will the average skilled nursing facility lose $600,000 in annual Medicaid reimbursement under the... Read More »

Capitol Seniors Housing Builds Its Portfolio

Washington, D.C.-based Capitol Seniors Housing headed up the coast to build a brand-new assisted living/memory care community in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, an affluent suburb of New York City. The firm utilized an existing operating partner, Chelsea Senior Living, which already operates 10 senior living communities in the Mid-Atlantic on behalf of CSH, to third-party manage the new 85-unit community. To finance the project, Aron Will of CBRE arranged a $16.75 million, non-recourse loan with a floating-rate term from a regional bank. The five-year term includes 48 months of interest only. Construction cost is estimated at $29.3 million, or about $345,000 per unit. That is $100,000 per unit... Read More »

Ensign Expands Into Texas and Wisconsin

The Ensign Group boosted its position in two markets with the acquisition of five assisted living communities previously operated by Brookdale Senior Living. First, in Texas, where the company already owns nearly fifty properties, Ensign acquired two 37-unit assisted living communities located in the towns of Lancaster (Dallas MSA) and Paris (rural east Texas). Lately, Ensign has only acquired skilled nursing facilities in the state: one San Antonio SNF in February 2017 and two others previously owned by National Health Investors in April 2016, to name a couple. So, while Ensign may have veered slightly from its recent Texas strategy with those two communities, the company doubled down in... Read More »