Starling Coo: Senior Living ‘must Adapt’ To Hospitality, Changing customer

Florida-based senior living provider Starling continues to hone its operating model to deliver more hospitality-focused services to residents amid strong demand.

Starling operates seven luxury senior living properties in Florida, with the communities at full capacity or high occupancy, according to COO Megan Kennedy.

The company’s newest community, Starling at Ponte Vedra, was acquired in 2024 and has undergone renovations since then to help bring the community up to standard, upgrade apartments and improve common areas. The community offers the full continuum of senior living services up to licensed nursing care, with wellness amenities including a salon, fitness center, therapy studio and an elevated dining experience. 

Kennedy told Senior Housing News that Starling is “open to expanding” its portfolio of communities if the right opportunity becomes available that matches the hospitality and services offered at existing Starling properties. 

In 2026, Kennedy said Starling is focused on “refining our operations” to make sure all communities are able to provide “exceptional experiences” for its residents, families and staff.

“We want to make sure that we’re operating not just as a stable operator but that we’re operating at an optimal level,” Kennedy told SHN. “We’re able to fine-tune and really work on tightening things up to improve our model.”

To do that, Starling is inveting recruitment, onboarding and staff retention, making Starling the “provider of choice” not only for residents but for staff.

When the company chooses to expand its portfolio, Kennedy said staffing is critical to being prepared for external growth. That’s meant to create career development pipelines for critical positions like future executive directors and future sales directors.

“We reward our team and recognize our rising stars, and that’s going to continue to be a focus of ours,” Kennedy said.

Beyond those executive director and sales director positions, Kennedy said Starling is creating pathways for mentorship between experienced Starling staff and new hires “for each department,” which is critical to sustaining strong senior living operations.

“So that way, you’ve got activity directors that have a mentor and can bounce ideas off each other and just have somebody they can really connect with and take their programming in their community to that next level,” Kennedy said. 

Before her time with Starling, Kennedy served as an executive director and understands how critical the position is to each community’s performance and consistency in operations. Today, Kennedy sees the executive director role as having “more of a hospitality focus.”

Interested staff seeking to move up the ranks will be able to shadow existing leaders to learn the ins and outs of the leadership position, while also shadowing other leaders from departments from sales to accounting to understand the multifaceted nature of the executive director role.

“My goal is to have people who are interested potentially work through this path in a six-month stint, depending on what we have coming down the pipe and where we are growth-wise,” Kennedy said. “We’ve had really solid success doing a modified version of this, where we’ve grown our own talent from within.”

Two current Starling executive directors were promoted from their respective memory care director roles, and Kennedy views that transition as a “solid trajectory” for career development with “a lot of parallels” in memory care operations translating to a broader executive director role.

One of the company’s “strongest” executive directors is a former high school athletic director, being able to draw on customer service and hospitality experience in academic administrative operations, Kennedy said.

To solidify staffing, Kennedy said Starling offers longevity bonuses and tuition reimbursement as ways to retain and recruit new leaders.

Starling will seek new growth that aligns with the company’s values and ensure that expectations between ownership groups and the operator are the same before expanding. Any new growth will be “smart and very measured” to enhance the company’s existing senior living portfolio.

She pointed to the two-year effort to grow operating performance at the Starling at Ponte Vedra community as proof of concept for the company’s operating thesis, focusing on hospitality, curating lifestyle offerings and providing clinical services to older adults.

Currently, Starling properties are functionally full with and growing waitlists. In the last 12 months, occupancy has exceeded 90% across nearly all properties, Kennedy added, with one community still aiming for that key occupancy goal.

“We’re focusing on growing our future leaders and bringing in additional systems, measures and initiatives for them to be able to do their job better,” Kennedy said.

Technology integration, along with bringing more AI-supported technology platforms on board, has been critical to the company’s march toward high census. Kennedy sees AI-supported technology as a way to support staff and give them more time with residents rather than focusing on administrative back-office tasks.

Sales and marketing have benefited the most from integrating AI-supported technology into the company’s operating model, enabling to nurture more leads, improve lead-to-conversion times and create more immediate follow-up with prospective older adults seeking senior living services.

Rising acuity among older adults, a trend witnessed across the sector in recent years, is another area of emphasis for Starling as it retools care capabilities while also balancing lifestyle and engagement needs. For example, the company “honed in” on its dining program to create more vibrant culinary offerings and cultivate a “more social experience” to provide residents with multiple options.

Looking ahead, Kennedy said operators that will thrive are going to be the ones who can deliver “an amazing resident and team member experience,” while adapting to a changing customer base as new generations enter senior living.

“We need to adapt and focus on the hospitality side and make sure that we’re evolving as our prospects are changing,” Kennedy said.

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