• 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 »
  • MIG Announces Two Closings

    Montgomery Intermediary Group announced a couple of transactions at the end of October. First, Andrew Montgomery sold a 120-bed skilled nursing facility in southern Illinois in a value-add deal. Built in the 1960s and 1970s, the facility had a roughly 50% Medicaid census, with between 30% and 35% private pay and 5% to 10% Medicare. It was losing... Read More »

Mainstreet Does Canada….Again

Perhaps one of the most dynamic firms in the senior care market, Mainstreet is at it again with a new publicly traded platform in Canada. Its last Canadian entity was sold to Health Care REIT (now Welltower) last year for a tidy profit. Using its recently announced acquisition of a portfolio of skilled nursing facilities in the Chicago market, Mainstreet has agreed to do a reverse merger with a shell company that is publicly listed in Canada that, when completed, will take the new name of Mainstreet Health Investments (MHI). And guess who will be the CEO of the new entity? None other than Zeke Turner, Mainstreet’s founder and CEO. MHI plans to buy skilled nursing, assisted living and... Read More »

CCRCs to Become LPCs?

Leading Age announced this week that they are proposing a new name for CCRCs: Life Plan Communities. What is it about all these name changes? First we have Health Care REIT becoming Welltower, followed by ALFA becoming Argentum. Now Leading Age, which already changed its name several years ago, has proposed that the industry adopt a new name for CCRCs, coming up with “Life Plan Communities.” A lot of people have had a desire to get away from the alphabet soup acronyms that are so common (ALFA, ASHA, AHCA, AAHSA), but these acronyms do make it easier at times. Will the new name become LPCs? That sounds a bit clinical to me, but who... Read More »

Welltower builds up

When Welltower announced its Q3:15 earnings, they revealed a host of seniors housing transactions closed in that period, totaling $361 million in investments. The largest purchase was for three seniors housing properties in Colorado (2) and Utah (1), with a combined 461 units. Welltower paid $155 million, or $336,200 per unit, for the properties, which are all managed by the company’s new operating partner, Leasure Care. There is a new master lease with a corporate guarantee, 6.0% initial yield and 3.0% annual escalators. The properties are expected to have a 1.1x stabilized lease coverage ratio after management fee. For the other third quarter acquisitions, prices ranged from $15 million... Read More »

Slumping Ventas

Investors did not like what they heard about Ventas for the third quarter, despite an earnings beat. So, when we first heard that Ventas was announcing that third quarter earnings were going to exceed estimates, we thought, ho-hum, so what else is new, they always beat estimates. The press release was glowing about all the accomplishments during the quarter. They revised guidelines for the full year slightly upward. I didn’t get a chance to listen in live to the earnings call, but I did notice how the share price dropped by 5%. What, on an earnings beat? And then it dropped a little more. It was the revenue miss and concerns about growth that sent investors to the exits. Since then, there... Read More »

The Name Game

In the last couple of days, two big players in the seniors housing industry announced name changes. First, Thomas DeRosa, CEO of Health Care REIT, announced in a letter to employees that the REIT would be renamed Welltower. Despite this change, the company will still trade under its ticker symbol “HCN” on the New York Stock Exchange. And then following this announcement, the Assisted Living Federation of America (ALFA) unveiled its new name, Argentum. Derived from the Latin for “silver,” the new brand will reflect the organization’s expanded focus on “expanding senior living” for the “silver generation.” While Health Care REIT’s announcement seems to have come out of left field, the ALFA... Read More »