• WOW! Sonida Senior Living Goes BIG

    Sonida Senior Living just announced what can only be described as a transformational acquisition. Since new management came in, CEO Brandon Ribar and CFO Kevin Detz, Sonida has been on an upward path of improved operations and a balance sheet that has grown stronger. Occupancy has been increasing (87.7% in Q3) and NOI and EBITDA are rising. Spot... Read More »
  • 60 Seconds with Swett: October Smashes M&A Record

    We were predicting a record-breaking end to the year in terms of M&A activity, but we are not sure we expected a 100+ deal month, with 110 transactions and counting. Just to put that in perspective, the previous record for any month was 77 deals in October of last year, and only four months had previously broken the 70-deal barrier. So this... Read More »
  • Newmark Ends October with Portfolio Closings

    Newmark announced a flurry of transactions at the end of October involving various institutional firms. The largest was a portfolio of seniors housing communities in the Northeast known as “Stars and Stripes.” Word on the street is that the portfolio sold for north of $800 million, and that a sub-portfolio was valued at more than $1 million per... Read More »
  • Stacked Stone Acquires Missouri Portfolio

    Stacked Stone Ventures announced the purchase of a seven-community assisted living/memory care portfolio in Missouri for $71 million, or $212,600 per unit. Totaling 334 units and 405 beds, the Oak Pointe portfolio was developed between 2015 and 2020 by an investor group called ClearPath Senior Housing, which included Jeff Binder of Senior Living... Read More »
  • Blueprint Sells Georgia Community to LTC Properties

    LTC Properties divested seven skilled nursing facilities through two separate deals for $122 million in October. In those transaction announcements, the publicly traded REIT noted that it intended to redeploy proceeds for the acquisition of newer, stabilized SHOP assets. It looks like that’s what the publicly traded REIT did in Georgia at the... Read More »
Capital Senior Living Misses the Mark, Again

Capital Senior Living Misses the Mark, Again

As we were watching the share price of Capital Senior Living drop for several days in a row before announcing their fourth quarter earnings results, we were wondering whether something had leaked out, or whether it was the usual sell off because the company had underperformed relative to expectations for too many quarters in a row. We may never know which it was, and maybe a bit of both, but underperformance was there again. Now, we can’t shoot the messenger because Kim Lody took over as CEO at the beginning of this year and was just a Board member before that, but the results were probably worse than anyone expected. Sequential occupancy declined by a whopping 110 basis points from the... Read More »
Capital Senior Living’s New CEO

Capital Senior Living’s New CEO

The day after it was announced that Kim Lody had been appointed as the new CEO of Capital Senior Living, we had the opportunity for a little one on one with her. Since she has been a director for the past four years, she was obviously well versed in the company’s issues and opportunities. But when asked why shareholders should be confident in her moving forward as CEO when she was a director during the largest collapse in shareholder value ever for the company, she had a decent response: “I wasn’t the CEO, so I had limited influence.” Well, now she is, and the buck will stop with her. The good news for shareholders is that she has a very strong background in sales and marketing, which is... Read More »
Capital Senior Living Misses the Mark, Again

Capital Senior Living Disappoints, And Pays A Price

We have now become nervous with each earnings period because there just seem to be too many surprises. Unfortunately, these surprises have usually been negative. Three months after being positive about the direction of the company, Capital Senior Living spooked investors not only with their poor results in the second quarter, but their dismal prospects for the rest of the year. When you underperform expectations, and cut full-year forecasts by 20%, you should expect the worst. And the worst was a 23% plunge in the share price on August 1, followed by a 5% decline the following morning. Volume was 6x the average, but not heavy in absolute terms. The news also took Brookdale Senior Living... Read More »
Senior Care Stocks Swoon….Again

Senior Care Stocks Swoon….Again

The 2017 Trump rally has left senior care and healthcare REIT stocks behind. It looks like the so-called Trump stock market rally is continuing into 2018. Weirdly, several senior care stocks shot up in the first day of trading yesterday. Where were investors last year? Unfortunately, 2017 was about as bad as it gets for our sector. Only one company posted an increase in price, and that was Kindred Healthcare, which is actually exiting our sector with its last sales of its SNFs. So, everyone else declined, and almost all of them by double digits, in a year when the rest of the market posted extraordinary returns. The NASDAQ Composite was up 28.2%, the Dow was up 25.1% and the S&P 500... Read More »
Good News from Brookdale and Capital Senior Living

Good News from Brookdale and Capital Senior Living

Finally, we have had some good news from the two largest publicly traded senior living companies, Brookdale Senior Living and Capital Senior Living. Let’s just say, it has been a long time coming. Capital Senior Living reported a sequential increase in occupancy of 30 basis points in the third quarter, an increase that was continuing to rise in September and into October, so the fourth quarter should be upbeat as well. In fact, from June to September same-community occupancy increased by 90 basis points. These numbers exclude their two communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey. On the negative side, labor costs increased by 4% in the third quarter, which contributed to a 2.4% decline in... Read More »