Brookdale Senior Living Keeps Eye On Operations After Teeing Up Last ‘meaningful’ Portfolio Cuts 

After years of pruning, Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) is finally within reach of its ideal portfolio size. Now, the company is narrowing its focus on operational improvements.

In 2026, the company expects to sell an additional 29 communities, generating about $200 million in proceeds and bringing its portfolio to 517 owned and leased properties. Of those communities, 14 were below the company’s desired 70% occupancy benchmark. As a result of the sales, Brookdale’s occupancy and other financial metrics will improve, according to CEO Nick Stengle.

The sales also “mark the final meaningful streamlining of our portfolio” after almost a decade of shrinking from the company’s once-massive size, Stengle said during the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call Thursday morning. The company’s current community count is more than half of the 1,100 communities it had just after its 2014 merger with Emeritus Senior Living.

Now that it has reached its ideal size, the company is seeking to improve operational results at its remaining communities. At the center of those efforts is a strategy that Stengle previously laid out that divides the company into effectively six individual operating companies, each overseeing a specific region of the U.S. Brookdale last November named Mary Sue Patchett to oversee that regional model as the company’s first chief operating officer in a decade.

The net effect of Patchett’s hiring and Brookdale’s new regional organization “is to have a company that can concurrently draw on the deep resources we have as the largest operator in senior living while also having the nimbleness to operate in a manner similar to six regional companies of roughly 100 communities each,” Stengle said during the call Thursday.

“Not only do we have a dedicated COO who wakes up every morning focused on driving great performance, driving great resident experience and driving move-ins, we also have regional teams,” Stengle said. “We have six regional leaders with a truly dedicated team of a sales leader, a clinical leader, an asset management leader, a dining leader – all the different functions,so that we can really focus in … on that super hyper-local decision that a customer faces when they’re contemplating senior living.”

Brookdale’s weighted average occupancy rate reached 82.5% in the fourth quarter of 2025, representing a gain of 310 basis points over the same period in 2024. Brookdale reported a net loss of $40 million in 4Q25, an improvement over the company’s $83.9 million net loss in 4Q24.

Brookdale stock dipped more than 9.7%, landing at $14.95 per share by the time financial markets closed Thursday.

Honing in on operations to grow RevPAR

Like many other senior living executives, Stengle believes that Brookdale has a significant opportunity immediately ahead of it in the form of demand from the baby boomer generation. The first boomers turned 80 in 2026, “an important benchmark” given that more than half of Brookdale’s residents move in between the ages of 80 and 90, and the company’s average resident age is about 83, Stengle said.

Given that opportunity and runway ahead, the company is doubling down on operations in order to grow its average revenue per available room (RevPAR).

Currently, the company’s executives believe that the operator can achieve RevPAR growth of 8% to 9% in 2026 and achieve adjusted earnings before taxes, earnings before taxes depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $502 million to $516 million this year. By comparison, Brookdale reported RevPAR growth of 5.7% and adjusted EBITDA of $458 million in 2025.

Once a Brookdale community reaches 80% occupancy, it hits “the approximate level at which we leverage our fixed costs,” meaning it wouldn’t need to spend more money to increase occupancy – and revenue – further. The company is seeking to grow occupancy accordingly at communities below that threshold.

“That really is kind of the sweet spot of where we focus a lot of our energy first,” Stengle said. “Let’s get communities above break-even. That usually happens fairly quickly.”

Brookdale execs have previously stated that every gain of 100 basis points of occupancy yields about $23 million in additional senior housing operating income on a same-community basis.

Part of that effort is Brookale’s HealthPlus, the program that helps the operators’ residents access preventative health care, wellness, care navigation and other services and is now in more than 180 of the operator’s communities. Brookdale has also in the last 12 months deployed “SWAT teams” to improve results at certain communities with occupancy below the company’s desired threshold through “capital investment leadership and marketing assessment. as well as pricing recalibration,” Stengle said.

“There’s a very practical, objective component where they’re just going to the hospital less. They’re going to the emergency room less,” he said.

Those efforts have paid off in the form of fewer communities with occupancy under the 70% watermark. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 80 Brookdale communities still carried occupancy below 70%, including 14 that will be sold.

As Stengle has previously outlined, Brookdale management sees three “key levers” the company must pull to get to its ultimate destination: taking advantage of current supply-demand dynamics, achieving critical mass in its market density and notching better operational results.

‘Leaning in’ to redeploying dollars in 2026

According to Stengle, Brookdale is “leaning in” to redeploying dollars back into its communities in the form of CapEx.

In 2025, Brookdale’s total non-development CapEx spend was almost $171 million. This year, the company expects to eclipse that number by with a non-development CapEx investment of approximately $175 million to $195 million “an increase from 2025, as we believe investing today will help us capture enhanced occupancy growth and rate into the future,” Stengle said.

Reporting to Brookdale COO Patchett is a newly hired senior vice president of strategic operations tasked with centralizing the company’s pricing strategy, analytics and implementation and managing staffing. The new leader also helps in decision-making for the operator’s capital investments at the community level, Stengle said.

As the company deploys those dollars, it won’t do so in a “peanut-butter-spread-type” way, he added. By that he means that the company’s dollar allocations won’t necessarily be uniform.

“The number will be much higher in a community that we really lean into. Other communities will be near zero or something almost meaningless as far as the CapEx,” he said. “It’s more, we are going to target specific communities in specific markets to drive that return and that NOI. So, it’s less of a piecemeal approach, which is what we’ve done a little bit of; and more of a comprehensive, targeted, deliberate approach.”

The post Brookdale Senior Living Keeps Eye On Operations After Teeing Up Last ‘Meaningful’ Portfolio Cuts  appeared first on Senior Housing News.