Rising Pricing Shows More Competition For Senior Living Communities As Development Remains Slow  

Senior living pricing per unit is on the rise. It’s all part of a steady upward trend in the industry that shows no sign of letting up.

A report from NIC MAP indicates deal pricing is reaching record highs. The average price per unit reached $210,000 in the third quarter of 2026, breaking the previous high of $208,000 seen in 2019. Across $21.5 billion in transactions, large deals with high per-unit pricing from companies such as Welltower (NYSE: WELL) are pushing up the cost of senior living properties.

Capital providers are pouring dollars into senior living, seeing it as a top-performing asset class in the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF) index, according to NIC MAP CEO Arick Morton. As the boomers age, companies are seeking to gobble up communities now to reap that demand. With few companies developing communities, buyers are circling for a shrinking pool of deals, driving up the cost to buy them.

“People are raising record funds, and in some cases a lot of these pension funds and are starting to do direct investing in partnership with an operator,” Morton told Senior Housing News.

Recent funds to that end include Kayne Anderson closing a $5 billion fund and Bain Capital closing a $3.4 billion fund, both of which are targeting senior housing.

The numbers tracked by NIC MAP include buildings that range between 20 to 25 years old and could soon become obsolete. Those properties can trade for significantly lower values compared to more modern Class A assets. Leaders with senior living brokerage CBRE have hit an average price per unit of around $750,000 per unit over the past year, higher than the average.

“We’re valuing some stuff now that’s well over $2 million a door,” Aron Will, vice chairman and co-chair at CBRE, told SHN.

Despite the rising cost of transactions, buyers of senior living real estate still say there is more to buy. Leaders of real estate investment trusts (REITs) in 2026 say their companies are still acquiring communities at a decent discount than the cost to build them. But every transaction that pushes the per-unit price higher also ratchets up competition for new deals, leading to a scarcity-driven cycle where companies like Welltower are constrained not by capital but by opportunities.

Pricing fell in post-Covid years, followed by a surge

Senior living capital providers are eyeing the transaction market in 2026, looking for their next deals and racing toward a record finish.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, senior living valuations plummeted by more than 40%, NIC MAP data showed. Fast-forward to 2026 and the average price per unit has exceeded its previous peak. In fact, total dollar volume for senior living M&A grew three times faster than the number of properties changing hands in the last year.

“Higher prices, more than a larger number of individual transactions, are now doing most of the work,” Dustin Shandri, senior housing market specialist at NIC MAP, wrote in an October report.

The price increase was gradual, not a big jump. In the third quarter of 2025, average unit pricing across the industry reached $175,000, rising steadily to $200,000 just two quarters later before reaching its current high. Current prices are 19% higher than they were at the beginning of the year, and 82% higher than an industry low in the first quarter of 2024 around $115,000.

Last year, NIC MAP data showed that buyers and sellers were moving closer together. Now, they are agreeing on terms at higher prices than before, the NIC data showed.

Deals with eye-popping prices are pushing the national average upward. According to the NIC MAP data, some of the largest deals in recently pushing these rates higher include Welltower’s acquisition of a 339-unit community for $230 million, Nuveen’s $212 acquisition of a Lincolnwood, Illinois community, Artemis Real Estate Partners’ acquisition of a 207-unit community in Florida for $140 million and Stonepeak acquiring a 168-unit Las Vegas community for $83 million.

Senior living operating conditions and a lack of new development have frozen these conditions into place for now. Average occupancy across the country reached 90.4% in the third quarter, a 175-basis point increase from the previous year, and increased interest rates, high construction costs and labor constraints keep new starts low, with the Senior Housing Market Outlook reporting a 67% decrease between 2021 and 2025, and new inventory has only grown 0.5% over the past year. Senior living resident rate upside is an increasingly attractive factor in new deals.

“Everything is compressed because the industry is fuller and is growing rents,” Will said. “A Class B property may only be growing rent 4.8% as opposed to 7% on a Class A … but that’s still the fourth consecutive year it’s had revenue growth that’s now exceeding what the expense growth in the industry has been.”

“The open question is whether the rest of the market closes the distance or the top end keeps moving ahead,” Shandri wrote. “With occupancy tightening and new development still hard to pencil, the pace of mid-market pricing is the part of the senior housing market metrics picture worth following most closely.” 

Conditions point to higher deal prices ahead

Rising occupancy. Low levels of new development. A shrinking pool of opportunities. All of these forces will affect the cost of senior living acquisitions into 2027 and beyond. Will believes per-unit prices will continue to increase for the next four to five years as deals garner returns faster than in the past. Companies willing to take on different risk profiles and look into other markets may find “interesting opportunities” to buy older assets and refurbish them, according to Will.

Senior living investors are still opting to buy rather than build for many Class A opportunities. But as the price per unit rises and reaches parity with the cost to develop, more will look at building anew as a viable alternative.

That has already happened at the top end of the market, Morton said. Indeed, Sunrise Senior Living is shifting to building out its development pipeline following its new owners BDT & MSD Partners taking a majority ownership. The 50-community pipeline is expected to total around $7.5 billion to develop.

“I do think the machine is really spinning up,” Morton said.

And some of yesterday’s buyers could be sellers tomorrow as price-per-unit rises. Newer entrants into the industry, such as Chicago-based Citrine Investment Group, are seeing the most lift in well occupied and stabilized Class A and Class B assets, according to Founder and President Lynn Jerath. It’s also resulting in greater competition in the bidding process for public deals, indicating the industry is well into a seller’s market.

Not all communities are trading for eye-popping prices compared to the past. Value-add and opportunistic deals that companies such as Citrine focus on

“We could be in the second inning of a multi-inning cycle where that seller’s market,” Jerath said. “There’s always opportunity … you could see in two years’ time some of the same assets trading again because there’s going to be even further lift in value.”

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