• 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 »

Hotel conversion to seniors housing

When a hotel in downtown Fort Myers, Florida is lying vacant for almost 10 years, what do you do with it? Convert it to seniors housing of course! At least, that is the plan of The MacFarlane Group, a developer of residential housing in Fort Myers who is looking to make its first move into seniors housing (who isn’t these days?). The reason behind the hotel’s vacancy is rooted in a one family’s dysfunction, who, when the family patriarch passed away, couldn’t agree on what to do about the property. Meanwhile, the empty hotel took up valuable acreage in downtown Fort Myers, much to city officials’ chagrin. So, MacFarlane stepped in last year to buy the property, which it eventually did in... Read More »

Brookdale May Be One Step Closer

With two new board members and some corporate governance changes, Brookdale Senior Living seems to be heading on the path of a major real estate event. What can I say, management at Brookdale Senior Living seems to be going down a path that I recommended they not take. Imagine that. Rather than have a public shareholder fight, they have added two new board members with some serious real estate experience, which is what activist investor Sandell Management wanted. The share price, however, closed early this week at its lowest level since March 6. Hmmm. We know that management and the board are supposed to make decisions to enhance shareholder value. I get it. But here is the problem. What... Read More »

What’s the price for quality?

For the past few years, we have separated out the “A” properties from the “B” properties in our statistics based on a few factors (age, size and location). Not surprisingly, the average price paid for “A” assisted living properties was higher than “B” assisted living properties ($244,800 per unit versus $102,300 per unit) by a difference of $142,500. To put it in perspective, the spread in 2013 was only $87,500 ($222,400 per unit for “A” versus $134,900 per unit for “B”). But what was especially interesting was that “A” properties made up about half of the sales in 2014, compared to 2013 when “B” properties were sold three times more often than “A’s”. This means that there were... Read More »

Trifecta from CBRE

Aron Will of CBRE National Senior Housing arranged a trifecta of acquisition financings totaling approximately $50 million. All three loans were floating rate bridge loans with five-year terms and between 24 and 30 months of interest only. The first was a $14.5 million loan provided by a regional bank for Capitol Seniors Housing to acquire a brand new 92-unit assisted living/memory care community in Tampa, Florida. Next, Mr. Will secured a $21 million loan with an “all-in” interest rate of approximately 2.35% for a joint venture between Sentio Healthcare Properties and Senior Living Residences to purchase a 122-unit/141-bed rental CCRC in Westfield, Massachusetts. The loan was provided by... Read More »

Not-for-profit New York SNF goes private

It won’t be business as usual for a not-for-profit skilled nursing facility in Yonkers, New York that is being purchased by a private ownership group for $22.7 million, or $189,200 per bed. The facility, built in 2001 by St. John’s Riverside Hospital and operated by the not-for-profit Riverside Health Care System, sits on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. For years, it solely relied on patients discharged from St. John’s, and its occupancy fell from 96% in 2012 to 93% in October 2014. The new owners, called L&A Operations and who operate Sprain Brook Manor Rehab in nearby Scarsdale, New York, plan to form new collaborations with other health care service providers in the area in... Read More »

Skilled Nursing M&A In 2015

After the record-setting valuations in 2014, the skilled nursing acquisition market is already off to a strong start. After the skilled nursing market hit a record for the average price per bed for the second year in a row last year, I wasn’t too sure what to expect for 2015. So far, I have not been disappointed, as buying interest continues to be relatively strong, especially at the higher price points. In 2014, there were 19 transactions with a price above $100,000 per bed. So far this year, there have been four sales with a range between $132,000 and $189,000 per bed. On the lower end of the scale, there have been just three transactions below $40,000 per bed, which either means the... Read More »

Average IL cap rate falls 80 basis points

The average cap rate largely depends on the properties that sold. Even in a year when valuations rise and cost of capital remains low, cap rates may actually rise because the communities sold were of lesser quality. That factor has played a key role in determining the average cap rate for independent living communities in the last two years. In 2013, there were more low-quality, small properties that sold, which drove the average cap rate for the year up 20 basis points to 8.2%. However, there were more quality independent living communities sold in 2014, which helped decrease the average cap rate by 80 basis points to 7.4%. What most likely happened is that owners of these prime... Read More »

MOB to Senior Living?

Monarch Senior Living is trying something new in seniors housing development. The company acquired a vacant 17,800 square-foot medical office building (MOB) in La Jolla, California for $7.115 million, which it plans to convert into a 26-unit/44-bed memory care community. Monarch will own the community with Menlo Park, California-based real estate equity sponsor HG Capital, and will also manage it upon completion. To fund both the purchase and the repurposing of the building, Aaron Beck of NorthMarq Capital arranged a five-year $9.96 million first mortgage loan for Monarch. The financing featured interest-only payments, a floating rate and minimal recourse so as to give the joint venture... Read More »

Another Holiday portfolio sells to a REIT

So goes another large portfolio of Holiday Retirement properties, with NorthStar Realty Finance’s acquisition of 32 independent living communities from affiliates of Harvest Facility Holdings, itself an affiliate of Holiday. The acquisition marks another step towards Holiday’s owner Fortress Investment Group’s goal of transforming Holiday into an operating company. In fact, since October 2013, Holiday has sold over 200 properties totaling about $5.1 billion. In that time, nearly all of those assets were sold to REITs, such as New Senior Investment Group, Sabra Health Care REIT, National Health Investors and Ventas, and that is no different in the most-recent transaction. NorthStar Realty... Read More »

County conversion

In what turned out to be a multi-year saga, the former director of development for Elderwood Senior Care (which was acquired in 2013 by Post-Acute Partners, a New York City-based health care services company), David Tosetto, is finally set to open a 150-unit assisted living community in Lockport, New York. In 2007, Niagara County closed the Mount View Health Facility, a 172-bed nursing facility, with the intention of replacing it with a new assisted living community, which was later determined to be financially infeasible. So in 2012, Mr. Tosetto, offered to purchase the facility for $550,000 and convert it into a 150-bed assisted living community. The sale closed in 2013, and Tosetto... Read More »

Developer investing in Kansas City area

Four years ago, Hunt Midwest, a real estate developer with a focus on industrial, commercial, retail, mission critical, multifamily, residential and senior living, invested $32 million to build four assisted living/memory care communities in the Kansas City metro area, all to be managed by Principal Senior Living Group under the “Benton House” brand. The final community of that investment just opened in Tiffany Springs, Missouri, but Hunt Midwest isn’t stopping there. The developer has already broken ground on two communities in Raymore and Blue Springs that will open later this year. Plus, there are two more set to break ground in Lenexa and Kansas City, which will bring the total for... Read More »