Ltc Properties Bets On Shop With Belief That Senior Living’s ‘golden Age’ Nears

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About 18 months ago, LTC Properties (NYSE: LTC) pivoted toward growth via a senior housing operating portfolio (SHOP) segment. Now, the company is about halfway through those efforts and building up its data collection and sharing efforts to continue that growth push this year.

This year, leaders with the Westlake Village, California-based senior living REIT are seeking to “aggressively” grow the company’s SHOP segment, with a target to increase it to approximately 45% of the company’s overall portfolio, up from 25% of its assets at the end of 2025. LTC is also seeking to grow its SHOP segment to account for 40% of the company’s net operating income (NOI).

According to Co-CEO Pam Kessler, the REIT is relatively new to the world of building deep data science capabilities. But such efforts are a cornerstone of the REIT’s “transformation” from a senior housing, skilled nursing REIT, primarily with triple-net leases; to one focused on SHOP.

In building out its data science platform, LTC is taking an approach similar to that of other senior living REITs like Welltower (NYSE: WELL) and Ventas (NYSE: VTR) with their Welltower Business System and Ventas OI platforms.

According to LTC Co-CEO Clint Malin, the REIT isn’t looking to “over-manage” its partners. Instead, the data science efforts are about sharing information to help them make better decisions on the ground, Malin and Kessler said.

“The value-add that a REIT partner brings to an operator is the ability to give them data that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, and slice it and dice it in multiple ways to help the decision-making process,” Kessler added during an interview at the recent NIC Spring Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

As of the end of last year, LTC Properties owned 186 properties across the U.S., including 92 triple-net communities and 25 in its SHOP segment.

LTC’s data science efforts aimed at better operations

In 2026, LTC Properties is building up its data science team.

According to Malin, LTC has so far put a lot of work and resources into honing its accounting and asset management skills. Earlier this year, the REIT’s leaders hired two new vice presidents and added them to its asset management team. Both leaders have “extensive” experience developing systems and managing senior housing properties, LTC EVP of Asset Management Gibson Satterwhite said during the REIT’s most recent earnings call in February.

Now, the REIT’s leaders are turning their collective focus to data science. Top of mind for them are adding new and better ways to support the operating partners in the company’s SHOP segment. For example, LTC seeks to use its burgeoning data science platform to help operators benchmark their occupancy, expenses and rental rates against their competitors and other operators in the REIT’s stable.

That’s an approach that LTC’s larger peers Ventas and Welltower have taken as both companies have driven their share values to near or at all-time highs this year.

“We try to align interests throughout the contract, which provides incentives annually for beating budgets, long-term promote structures that reward good performance of the asset and information and data along the way,” Malin told SHN. “Data is the last part of what we’re working to put together.”

He added that building new data capabilities is the biggest focus for the REIT’s senior leadership this year.

The need for a more sophisticated data science platform rests partly with the company’s growing number of SHOP partners, now at 11. The REIT began working with nine of those partners for the first time since launching the new segment in May 2025.

Regarding the timing of the SHOP growth, Kessler said LTC management is often asked, “why now?” The answer to that question is that senior housing demand is surging while the rate of new community openings remains low. For an established company with a growing SHOP platform, those conditions represent a once-in-a-career opportunity.

“I think we’ll look back at this point in senior housing and see that this was the golden age,” she said. “We made a strategic decision that this is where we were going to put all our chips in.”

LTC had ‘two choices’ for growth

Coming out of the pandemic’s hardest years, LTC Properties leaders had to choose between two paths for future growth.

One path would have taken LTC deeper into owning skilled nursing facilities managed under triple-net agreements. The other – which LTC ended up choosing – took the company in the direction of SHOP.

“If you look at the growth profile of private-pay senior living, that is a more compelling story, and that’s why we pivoted,” Malin said. “We see a stronger growth profile. We’re going from a triple-net REIT that had a low growth profile through annual escalators and rent to a SHOP-focused REIT that has a higher organic growth profile.”

To that end, LTC is an ideal size to seek out and acquire communities on a small scale – from one community to a handful at any one time – that it can use to further its growth strategy in a more granular way.

Aiding the company is a co-leadership strategy that allows Malin and Kessler to focus on different parts of the business and divide their attention in a way that one CEO may not be able to do alone.

“You really have more of an effort to be able to divide and conquer, to do a lot more,” Malin said. “Having this dual leadership role to effectuate this transformation has been critical. I would say it’s allowed us to accomplish this.”

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