Senior Living Faces Choose-your-own-adventure Moment In 2026

This story is part of your SHN+ subscription

New payment structures bringing in additional revenue. Preparing for development. Launching third-party management services. Economic uncertainty. This is all part of the senior living industry’s choose-your-own-adventure year in 2026.

During the 2026 Spring National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC) conference in Nashville, I heard multiple strategies for seizing the current opportunities in senior living.

For example, senior living operators like Lifespark and National Church Residences are taking a bigger role in their residents’ health care, efforts that are paying off in the form of added revenue. Others, like active adult operator Treplus Communities, are broadening services to reach a wider swath of prospective residents. All the while, senior living companies are assembling the pieces for new development now so they can kickstart those plans once it becomes feasible again.

Putting the pieces together, I believe 2026 is shaping up to be a “choose-your-own-adventure” year for the senior living industry. Operators and community owners have multiple opportunities to pursue, all of which could lead to success in their next chapters.

But like a choose-your-own-adventure book, what lies immediately ahead is not always certain. Companies could turn the page expecting one outcome and find themselves in another. In 2026, economists like Moody’s Co-Founder Mark Zandi are having trouble forecasting what comes next for the U.S. economy, given the Iran war and its effects on the cost of oil and global trade. Senior living operators and their customers alike are not immune to the impacts of these issues.

In this week’s exclusive, members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze comments from the 2026 Spring NIC Conference and offer the following takeaways, including:

• The choices senior living companies are making to prepare for the future
• Challenges in labor and the economy that threaten to derail momentum 
• Inside the next chapter of M&A, new development

Turning the page

Senior living companies are making choices now that they believe will secure their financial and operational health in the future.

<< Add in a paragraph or two here from your Lifespark/National Church Residences story, make sure you highlight what Joel said about this being a “lead or follow” moment for the industry >>

As Theisen sees it, senior living faces a “lead or follow” moment, embracing value-based care and reaping the financial and clinical benefits of leaning into new payment models.

Providers in the industry face a crucial choice: start on value-based care efforts or risk being left out of the benefits from the value they create improving the lives of older adults with emphasis on preventative health services, life enrichment and wellness initiatives.

Some senior living companies are forging ahead with third-party management as new development remains frozen. One such company is Treplus, which just recently launched a third-party management service to manage active adult communities that are potentially struggling with lease-up.

CEO Jane Arthur Roslovic described the strategy as “boutique” and aimed at multifamily companies that don’t necessarily understand active adult as well as a company like Treplus does.

“It’s a challenge, but I think it’s an exciting challenge,” she told SHN Senior Editor Tim Regan at the 2026 Spring NIC Conference. “It’s going to set us up for lots of opportunity that’s coming.”

Treplus isn’t the only senior living operator taking this approach. Beztak also recently launched third-party management services in what Executive Vice President of Senior Living Jason Kohler sees as its “next evolution.”

During the conference, operators mentioned they’re focusing on evolving operations in 2026. This includes growing data and analytics platforms to support regional and site leaders, while also improving community life as they stack occupancy and revenue gains.

“In the last couple of years, when a resident reaches out to me, the biggest theme is technology,” Trilogy Health Services CEO Leigh Ann Barney told me during the conference.

In 2026, Discovery Senior Living is refining its data and analytics platform while creating a framework for using AI across the company’s network of over 420 communities, CEO Richard Hutchinson told me at Spring NIC 2026.

“Until you have your entire tech stack optimized, integrated, cleansed and de‑duplicated, the impact of AI will be minimal,” Hutchinson said.

Making the current period harder is the fact that there are multiple challenges, from staffing trends to challenges in the larger economic landscape. During NIC, I sensed that the senior living industry is very optimistic about the fact that the baby boomers are finally here, but that optimism also is tempered by uncertainty.

M&A moment in 2026

Just as operators face a choose-your-own-adventure future this year, so too do owners and investors of senior living properties. But their road ahead is just as clouded in uncertainty.

The “most aggressive” capital currently interested in senior living investment today is chasing demographic demand in primary markets, taking advantage of rising property occupancy rates in primary markets, according to Berkadia Senior Managing Director Dave Fasano.

“We’ve had this period of four to five years where you’ve had to hold and now, with no new supply, occupancy and revenue are climbing,” Fasano told me. “Each investor has their own yield profile that they’re solving for, and the market can solve those equations all over the place.”

In 2026, investors have cast a “spotlight” on senior living, NIC Head of Research and Analytics Lisa McCracken said during the conference.

But seasoned adventurers in the senior living investment space are now competing with new firms entering the fray. Last month, we covered how Landmark Properties, with over $15 billion in assets under management, is entering senior housing investment. This follows action early in 2025 when Apollo announced plans to acquire Bridge Investment Group, which owned over 60 senior living properties at the time of the deal announcement.

“There’s more capital that has come to the forefront,” Fasano said.

But there could be a ceiling to the sector’s ability to absorb new capital if there are no signs of larger portfolio transactions taking place in 2026, McCracken told me.

While there are still enough stabilized, Class A properties to go around in the early stages of this year, competition is heating up for assets and in turn increasing prices, McCracken told me. This could fuel investors to seek out stabilized or strong assets in secondary and tertiary markets.

“It can be a different niche investment that might not be a high-end luxury product, but there is an investment thesis certainly,” McCracken said. “It is all about alignment.”

Thawing development signs contrast against persistent challenges

Enthusiasm among operators and their equity partners is building as the cost of acquiring projects is slowly closing the gap on replacement costs—a sign of “thawing around the edges” for future development activity, according to Ryan Cos. Southern Division President Julie Ferguson.

“They’re more enthusiastic about development than they have been in probably two years,” Ferguson told SHN Senior Editor Tim Regan during the conference. “The theory of, ‘I can buy it cheaper than I can build it’ is still a theory, but that gap is closing pretty quickly.”

The senior living sector faces a supply gap of 370,000 units by 2030, based on the assumption the industry builds 191,000 new units in that timeframe stemming from current construction rates, according to NIC MAP data.

Macroeconomic factors still pose several significant challenges to how operators choose to grow in 2026 and beyond. High inflation and interest rates, combined with the spike in energy prices due to the Iran war, will force operators to grapple with rising expenses and rising staffing pressure.

If oil prices remain elevated into next year, the odds of an economic recession are “very high,” Zandi said during the conference.

Threatening any new development returning en masse are elevated interest rates and construction costs—putting the industry in a difficult place to meet future demand substantially by 2030.

“You have to wait another year, or at least another six months,” Zandi said of potential new development activity.

While broader factors may be preventing the shovels from coming out en masse, one potential leading indicator of development restarting is whether or not architectural and design firms are starting on new projects, something that Ferguson said Ryan Cos. was witnessing in 2026.

Groups dipping their toes back into pre-development work are doing so to be first in capturing new demand as project timelines have extended out to nearly three years before construction is completed. But this takes on more risk, forcing operators to work with their development partners to make sure their market analysis is accurate given elevated financing and construction costs.

“The people who have the capital to start working on that are starting to spend some of that,” Ferguson said. “They’re trying to be smart and be cautious and also not overextend themselves.”

For example, Cogir Senior Living is gearing up for a development push in 2026 and beyond. The company intends to expand its footprint from 17 states to 24 states in the coming years, prioritizing development in markets that create regional density, Cogir Real Estate CEO Mathieu Duguay told me during the conference. While the exact timeline of the growth wasn’t finalized, I think this is an encouraging sign that one of the largest operators in the U.S. and Canada is sharpening its pencil to be ready for future development.

Cogir is exploring development sites in multiple states, targeting projects of 200 to 400 units with a full continuum of care services. As part of the planned development growth, Cogir is forming a U.S.-based development team to actively pursue sites within master-planned communities for future Cogir properties, Duguay said.

Being part of master-planned sites is one way operators are starting to re-enter the development space in 2026. Last month, we learned that Harbor Retirement Associates (HRA) is restarting its development pipeline with a luxury community in Florida in proximity to a master-planned community with single-family homes and condominiums.

This tells me that operators are getting smarter about how they approach new builds given the less-than-ideal conditions for getting projects financed and built, focusing on developments that create properties within highly amenitized areas rather than being isolated on the outskirts of a city or town.

To achieve development growth in a difficult climate, National Church Residences CEO Susan Dimickele said providers “have to be creative” in seeking out tax credits, municipal grants and local partnerships.

The Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit senior living provider oversees 353 affordable communities and 16 senior living properties. Since 2018, National Church Residences has relied on income averaging across its affordable senior living developments to offer access to more older adults who need quality, and who come in just above the area median income (AMI) requirements set for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program.

“The middle market is the market that everyone is struggling to serve because they don’t qualify for a subsidy and don’t have all this discretionary income,” Dimickele told me. “It’s not impossible, you just have to be creative.”

Improved access to FHA loans as part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 232 program, with an “express lane” launched last September, could also start improving the lack of new supply, especially among groups wanting to build affordable assisted living and memory care properties, Vium Capital Senior Managing Director Steve Kennedy said during the conference.

“You’re always going to have your Class A development but we’ve been talking about affordable and middle-market for a long time and what a better opportunity to figure it out and get the pent-up capital deployed,” Kennedy told me. “You’ve got a quicker lease-up, a lower basis and the ability to reposition that asset.”

While margins in affordable and middle-market price points will never reach the hefty margins of a stabilized, luxury project in a primary market, the overwhelming demand from the “Forgotten Middle” group of older adults should, in my opinion, spur more operators to pursue middle-market growth.

Some companies executing on solving this so-called “math problem” include Mainstay Senior Living, an operator growing in the Southeast at a price point of approximately $3,000 per month.

Without development activity, the sector faces other health care models, like home care, “invading our space and becoming the new norm,” Hutchinson told me during the conference. This is because “health care will find a way” to capitalize on demographic trends led by the boomers.

This warning must be one the industry heeds wisely, using creative and smarter strategies to build sought-after communities the next generation of senior living customers will desire, or miss out on the full potential of the demand currently at the industry’s doorstep.

Timing will be critical in financing and starting construction, but what is an adventure without a few calculated risks along the way?

Operators choosing the path of M&A growth are betting on scale and the ability to turn existing assets in a time of high occupancy and low supply. Meanwhile, those opting for new development are playing a longer, more capital-intensive game, betting on being first to deliver new communities that outweigh today’s financing and construction cost hurdles.

The wrong choice isn’t about strategy, but rather failing to commit down one path or the other on this growth adventure in 2026.

The post Senior Living Faces Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Moment in 2026 appeared first on Senior Housing News.