• Value-Add AL/MC Community Trades

    An institutional owner decided to divest a non-core asset, and engaged Jason Punzel, Vince Viverito, Jake Anderson and Taylor Graham of Senior Living Investment Brokerage to run the sale process. The asset is located in Hillsboro, Oregon (Portland MSA), and features 36 assisted living and memory care units, with 62 licensed beds. It was built in... Read More »
  • Brookdale Divests California Community to Public REIT

    Blueprint was engaged by an institutional, national owner/operator in the strategic disposition of a large rental CCRC in Bakersfield, California. The 20-acre campus was developed in 1999 and provides the whole continuum of care, including independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing across three large buildings and... Read More »
  • Two Midwest Assets Trade

    A couple of seniors housing communities traded in the Midwest, selling to a couple of growing owner/operators. First, in the Indianapolis area, The Kiser Group’s Mark Myers and SVN | Senior Living Advisors’ John Klement led the sale of a 157-unit seniors housing community featuring a mix of independent living, assisted living and memory care... Read More »
  • Assisted Living Portfolio Closes in Wisconsin

    Bob Richards of Senior Care Realty recently completed the sale of a five-property assisted living portfolio in Wisconsin, closing the deal in multiple tranches. Richards had worked with the seller, AC Capital, for 15 years, helping them grow their portfolio over the years. AC Capital also has self-managed the communities for the last decade. Now,... Read More »
  • 60 Seconds with Swett: Here We Go Again

    AARP just published a report on assisted living, and all I can say is, here we go again. It concludes that “the state of assisted living today is cause for concern for many stakeholders. The lack of national federal standards for care centers creates an underregulated space.” It continues on, stating that the “absence of national oversight,... 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 »