• 60 Seconds with Swett: Navigating the Next Five Years in Seniors Housing M&A

    Are we entering the golden age of seniors housing? Next year, the first baby boomers will start turning 80, and with the current lack of new construction, occupancy rates are already rising before the real demographic wave hits. Many investors, both veterans and those new to our space, will feel pressure to grow their seniors housing holdings to... Read More »
  • Blackstone Sheds Another Asset from Its Seniors Housing Portfolio

    Blueprint handled a couple of sales in Florida and Nevada. The first in Florida involved a global private equity firm selling a 145-unit assisted living and memory care community in Boca Raton, Florida. Ben Firestone, Dillon Rudy and Jacob Ghel of Blueprint facilitated The Atrium at Boca Raton’s ownership transfer. The community presented certain... Read More »
  • CareTrust REIT Establishes SHOP Platform

    Three Texas seniors housing communities with 270 assisted living and memory care units were acquired by CareTrust REIT, Inc. The publicly traded REIT purchased the communities for $40 million, or $148,100 per unit. This marks the first investment of CareTrust’s SHOP platform. The communities were 86% occupied at the time of acquisition and will... Read More »
  • Ensign Grows Through Separate Transactions in Three States

    The Ensign Group, Inc. increased its portfolio through three separate acquisitions in Kansas, Arizona and Colorado. The publicly traded provider expanded its growing Midwest footprint through its Kansas acquisition of the real estate and operations of Willow Point Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, a 45-bed skilled nursing facility in Kansas... Read More »
  • Developer/Operator Divests to PE Firm

    A developer and operator sold Rivertown Ridge, a Class-A seniors housing community in the Grand Rapids suburb of Wyoming, Michigan, to a private equity firm. This community, built in 2020, features 152 units of independent living, assisted living and memory care, and has exhibited strong performance.  The seller, Redstone Homes, was... Read More »
The two Assisted Living markets

The two Assisted Living markets

We first separated out the “A” properties from the “B” properties in 2012, based on the properties’ age, size and location. While there will likely be some “A” communities mixed in with the “B” communities (and the other way around), it all evens out. And when looking at the numbers, these are clearly two different markets. In 2015, “A” properties sold for an average of $248,500 per unit, while “B” properties sold for an average of $138,300 per unit, a difference of $110,200. That means that “A” properties were worth almost double the value of “B” properties. The previous year (2014) the difference was amplified even more. “A” properties in 2014 sold for an average of $244,800 per unit and... Read More »

2015: A Year of Extremes?

We have mentioned previously that 2014 saw an unusually large number of high-valued transactions, with the extreme top-end prices driving the average seniors housing prices to historic levels, as well as pushing down cap rates to new lows. But in 2015, while there were proportionally fewer of both the highest-priced deals and the lowest-priced deals (see our April 13 blog post), it was a year of extremes for cap rates. In 2014, the two ends of the market (cap rates above 9% or below 7%) made up 24% of the year’s transaction cap rates. In 2015, cap rates over 9% made up 15% of the total cap rates, and those under 7% accounted for 27%, combining for 42% of the market. Clearly, the boost in... Read More »
A weightier fall

A weightier fall

In our quest to try to determine the truest “market cap rate” for the seniors housing market, for the first time in 2014 we decided to weight each transaction’s cap rate based on its number of units. For the seniors housing market (including both assisted living and independent living), whereas the average un-weighted cap rate in the last four years fell in two descending plateaus, the weighted average had a steadier decrease. In reality, it was a slightly steeper fall, with the unweighted average decreasing by 100 basis points from 2012 to 2015 and the weighted average decreasing by 110 basis points. As in all previous years, the weighted average cap rate in 2015 was lower than the... Read More »

IL cap rates follow prices down

As prices rise, we would expect cap rates to depress accordingly to reflect the increasing values. However, even though the average price per unit for independent living properties fell 22% from $246,800 in 2014 to $192,900 in 2015, the average IL cap rate dropped by 40 basis points from 7.4% in 2014 to 7.0% in 2015. What contributed to this anomaly? First, independent living prices reached unsustainable heights in 2014, propped up by a number of sales of high-quality properties by owners drawn into the frothy market. So, it is not surprising that the average IL price fell to a still-respectable value (the second-highest average price, in fact). Second, there were simply fewer high-cap... Read More »
AL cap rates sink even deeper

AL cap rates sink even deeper

We have spent the last few weeks discussing the skilled nursing market, focusing particularly on the average cap rate falling to near-record lows. But what about the assisted living M&A market? We saw the average price per unit for assisted living communities rise slightly (from $188,700 in 2014 to $189,200 in 2015), and in turn the average cap rate fell by five basis points from 7.75% to 7.7%. Despite the slight decrease, this is still a continuation of the “new normal” AL market. Since the Great Recession, the average cap rate has steadily been declining, and seemed to rest at around 8.7% in 2012 and 2013. But since then, the current market has settled to an average cap rate around... Read More »