Sonida Senior Living Builds Strategy Centered On Scale Following Cnl Healthcare Acquisition  

Leaders with Sonida (NYSE: SNDA) Senior Living have shifted their focus from stabilizing communities to growth as the company enters into a new phase of operations built around leveraging scale.

Sonida earlier this year completed an acquisition of CNL Healthcare Properties, a move that helped assemble the Dallas-based company into a $3.5 billion platform with 164 senior communities it owns, invests in or manages. Sonida CEO Brandon Ribar sees more potential for growing ahead.

“The size of the overall senior living market far exceeds, for a number of years, the amount of annual transaction volume that we’re seeing. We don’t see this as a short-term race-to-the-finish-line type of thing,” Ribar told Senior Housing News. “We think there’s sustainable growth here in the coming years to be able to continue buying communities at attractive price points, implementing our systems and our people, and then delivering really strong growth results for our investors.”

The company has $88 million in upcoming acquisitions under contract, with more opportunities under review. Sonida is targeting newer vintage communities with multiple product types spanning the continuum of senior living.

“What we’re acquiring today is very consistent with what we’ve successfully bought and integrated over the last two and a half years,” Ribar said.

The company’s leaders also are in 2026 bolstering digital marketing efforts and continuing investments in expanding communities with strong return profiles as more communities begin to reach full occupancy.

Room for expansion

Sonida is notching occupancy gains across its portfolio, with a weighted average of 87.9% in the second quarter of 2026, representing a 240-basis point increase versus the same period in 2025. Around 10% of Sonida’s portfolio has reached full occupancy.

As senior living occupancy climbs, it’s leaving operators less room to improve in a phenomenon that NIC Senior Principal Omar Zahraoui recently called the “great tightening.” But, Ribar still sees room to grow rental rates and expand into other in-demand unit types such as assisted living or memory care.

“Investments in your own portfolio that deliver returns that meet your expectations are, by definition, the lowest risk because you already know what you’ve got, and you’ve got a good sense for how many additional residents you could potentially bring into the community,” Ribar said.

Sonida’s growth strategy targets markets where it already has a presence, namely Atlanta, northern Florida, parts of Texas and the Midwest. Among its new markets are Kansas City and St. Louis, where Ribar sees additional growth opportunities. The company also sees expansion opportunities in the Pacific Northwest following the CHP acquisition.

“We feel like there’s good opportunity across those various areas,” Ribar said. “We’re probably not going to be getting any further kind of acquisitions in some of the places that haven’t been target markets for us. California and the Northeast really haven’t been on our radar.”

Sonida has its sights set on building out a portfolio with communities largely ranging from 100 to 140 units, which aligns with other recent acquisitions Sonida has accomplished in previous years. Between 2022 and 2025, Sonida closed on $296 million in acquisitions during the company’s stabilization period.

As the company continues to grow, its leaders are reinvesting in the home office team to offer more support and resources for the new communities it acquires. In 2026, the company has invested around $3 million in building out its operational excellence team, which consists of former executive directors, directors of operations, clinical staff, senior sales leadership and systems team members.

“They’re literally boots on the ground with new acquisitions and new transitions,” Ribar said. “We’re just believers that you can’t do everything virtually, especially when people are trying to learn a bunch of new things or understand the most immediate benefit of our systems.”

Marketing and labor focuses

Two additional areas of focus for Sonida through the remainder of the year are stabilizing labor costs and increasing digital marketing efforts.

In the second quarter, labor costs as a percentage of Sonida’s revenue reached a portfolio low of 40.4%, indicating a 130-basis-point decrease year-over-year.

Alongside cutting down on agency usage, investing in internal systems has proved beneficial in identifying where staffing adjustments can be made. The Sonida Performance Insight Navigator, or SPIN, allows better insight into how busy staff are, the overall needs of residents and identifying when and where high performing staff can handle working with fewer on shift.

Sonida has also made an effort to pay above-market rates for its caregivers to better retain staff, Ribar said.

“Over this last year, we’ve really been able to start to harness that information to manage just the overall number of hours, and then also reinvest dollars into the wage profile,” Ribar said. “Our goal is to make sure that we’re paying people who are doing a great job above market, and ultimately that what that leads to is a more efficient just number of hours that you need.”

During Sonida’s quarterly earnings call, Ribar attributed increasing occupancy rates to increased lead volumes from digital marketing efforts and a higher conversion to tour ratio. Part of the investment comes in an effort to bring newly acquired communities up to speed faster and get information out about the new ownership to prospects, while the other investments come from boosting Sonida’s organic marketing through its website and Google, which has a higher price point than third party referral services.

The conversion ratio on leads generated through Sonida’s own channels is much higher than if it sent to other communities. It also better reflects today’s digital landscape with AI and large language models, and marketing efforts reflect that through highlighting services, activities and care staff at each community.

“What’s important is the whole search landscape and the LLM influence in how people really look for things online continues to evolve the importance of having information about your communities that’s not generic, but that’s very individualized, has become more and more important,” Ribar said. “Each one of our communities builds their own profile.”

The post Sonida Senior Living Builds Strategy Centered On Scale Following CNL Healthcare Acquisition   appeared first on Senior Housing News.