Agewell senior Living ups Growth Ambitions with potential For Ownership, acquisitions 

AgeWell Senior Living has a five-year plan to reach 75 communities under management by 2031. Now at nearly the halfway mark to those plans, the company is ahead of schedule. 

In early June, leaders with the North Palm Beach, Florida-based operator added seven properties to the company’s management portfolio to expand its presence in Virginia and South Carolina, bringing it up to 36 communities. The company’s growth is centered on growing its presence across the Southeast in markets such as Florida, Virginia and South Carolina.

That’s only a portion of what the operator has planned for growth this year, according to CEO David Mills. Looking ahead, the company has the potential to add another 17 more communities to its portfolio with partners. AgeWell also has ambitions to own or acquire communities.

“We’ve performed to a level that’s past the norm right now, and because of that, we’re getting a lot of interest in our platform,” Mills told Senior Housing News.

AgeWell Senior Living’s leaders have kept busy this year. They first navigated a rebrand back in March. As they expanded the company through third party management, it has produced over $20 million in revenue for its real estate investment trust (REIT) partners. Mills attributed that success to the company’s ability to take on communities and stabilize them with home-office support.

AgeWell’s strength lies in its ability to more intimately manage communities than some other operators, according to Mills. The operator takes on opportunities where previous operators had regional staffers overseeing more than two-dozen communities. AgeWell’s regional vice presidents don’t oversee more than nine or 10 communities at a time.

“We work for those vice presidents in all our capacities to make sure they have everything they need for that owner and for that team,” Mills said.

Growing quickly

Along with the seven communities it picked up in June, AgeWell is preparing to pick up another potential 13-community deal later this year in September with another four or five communities before then through a partnership with National Healthcare Properties (Nasdaq: NHP), allowing it to come ever closer to its original 75-community goal.

The new additions are coming from present ownership groups that are “handing buildings” to AgeWell, according to Mills. Given the pace of those handoffs, Mills said he thinks the company will end up with more communities than 75, and he is now planning to oversee a portfolio of up to 90 communities.

Mills doesn’t want the company to become the same size as some of the largest operators in the industry such as Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) or Discovery Senior Living and he is careful to maintain the company’s culture as it grows.

Alongside the management growth plan, Mills foresees a return to community ownership through acquisitions.

“We like the idea,” he said. “We’ve been planning to get into re-ownership. We’ve not had a lot of losses on communities, anything that was planned correctly and done correctly, we’ve achieved the goals.”

To prepare for the new load of communities it is taking on, AgeWell is dedicated to “not stretching its team” with new hires across the company. Recently, the operator promoted and hired three new regional vice presidents and the support staff at the home office to support them. Mills draws on his former Marriott experience when hiring for roles, with two-thirds coming from internal promotions and one-third coming from external hires.

“I’m a firm believer that if we give the ownership groups either knowledge of the company and the systems, or knowledge of the area, then we can work on one or the other while they’re there,” Mills said.

‘Nothing that falls through the cracks’

AgeWell’s leaders seek to grow the company’s number of regional vice president pool to aid growth across the Southeast. The operator aims for a ratio of one back-office staff team member per building within the management portfolio, which helps with the success it finds with stabilization efforts.

“We’ve always run heavier than that, just because of wanting to support our ownership groups to make sure that there’s nothing that falls through the cracks,” Mills said. “It’s where we want to stay. It’s something that our 30 years of experience tells us that we need.”

To reach the goal of 90 communities, AgeWell is going to focus on additional promotions and hires to ensure it has a support staff ratio of one regional vice president, one area sales specialist and one support nurse per 10 communities across the portfolio.  

“It’s the same thing we’ve always done,” Mills said. “There’s some ownership groups that are growing quickly that we do business with … We do not want to tax the home office.”

He added: “If we look at all the companies that have grown and and failed over the years, they’ve all done something wrong. Most of the time it was stretching their stretching their team inappropriately, so the goal that we have is not to do that.”

The post AgeWell Senior Living Ups Growth Ambitions With Potential for Ownership, Acquisitions  appeared first on Senior Housing News.