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The senior living industry must be bolder in moving beyond current models to meet the needs of the next generation of older adults.
Earlier this week, I caught up with Serenbe CEO Steve Nygren, whose company is behind a sprawling development in Georgia that plans to expand its new-urbanism-inspired campus with everything needed to sustain a fully functioning wellness community. The proposed expansion includes a school, hotel, retail and commercial spaces along with private homes.
“It’s becoming more obvious that the way we have been building places for people has not been working,” Nygren told me. “I think we all have to agree that maybe it isn’t working and there needs to be new models.”
While I don’t think senior living operators need to copy the Serenbe model specifically, I do think the company’s vision is one that more companies should take into account as they ponder the future of senior living. It’s been said time and time again that the boomers don’t want a clinical or stuffy place to live, resist labels and want somewhere that both caters to their needs and offers them a different kind of lifestyle.
Baby boomers between the ages of 60 and 78 accounted for slightly more than half of all home sellers in 2024, according to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report. When they do sell, they are often moving closer to family or friends, downsizing or entering retirement, according to the report.
“[Boomers] sell their homes, give up ownership and they want to move into something that is attractive to them and not a lateral move,” Helios Healthcare Advisors Managing Director Mario Santiago recently told me.
I think that more companies should take that into account and plan communities that offer something more than a “lateral move.” The good news is that there are companies out there trying to do just that – but the rub is that development challenges make these projects tough to pencil out, especially if they are large and sprawling. Still, I think there are lessons learned that operators can better incorporate into their growth plans.
In this week’s exclusive, SHN+ Plus Update, I analyze recent activity on senior living wellness and offer the following takeaways:
– How the senior living industry has grown its wellness offerings in recent years, and why it must go further
– Data on loneliness and isolation that shows there’s more the industry can do to transcend being a “lateral move”
Recap of senior living’s wellness push
The senior living industry is awash in new ideas with which companies are seeking to attract tomorrow’s residents. But I think there are even greater opportunities to expand wellness programs or retrofitting existing models with more value-based care payment options that can help keep residents well for longer.
Operators like Bickford Senior Living, Juniper Communities and Lifespark are joining forces with other companies and building new value-based care models, and I think there is plenty of wisdom contained therein for the rest of the senior living industry. Using its Connect4Life tool, Bloomfield, New Jersey-based Juniper is able to integrate personalized care services along with establishing a robust wellness model that ties together care coordination, on-site care delivery and ancillary clinical services as residents age.
“In simple terms, we say wellness is about food, fitness and fun,” Juniper CEO Lynne Katzmann said earlier this year.
Over the last two years, I have also seen some of the largest players in the industry getting involved in new wellness models. In 2024, Welltower (NYSE: WELL) acquired a 25-community active adult portfolio from Affinity Living, expanding the company’s “wellness housing” portfolio to nearly 25,000 units.
At the time, CEO Shankh Mitra commented that the Affinity acquisition helped to address a “significant and growing unmet demand for wellness-focused rental housing” options for older adults.
This year, Commonwealth Senior Living launched a wellness model for residents known as Journeys. The operator piloted the model in eight communities last year to build customized lifestyle and care options based on resident interest. Other operators including Watermark Retirement Communities, Liberty Senior Living, Senior Resource Group have taken steps in the last two years to solidify their wellness offerings. I see themes within these organizations placing greater emphasis on care coordination and technology integration to support wellness goals.
“We’re focused on resident well-being to create engaging experiences that encourage longer stays,” Watermark Retirement Communities COO Jeff Slichta told me earlier this year.
In 2024, Evanston, Illinois-based Mather opened a $370 million life plan community, known as The Mather, in Tysons, Virginia that aims to redefine senior living wellness and lifestyle standards for the next generation of senior living customers through immersive programming, amenities to improve health like a saltwater pool and an infrared sauna.
Programming was designed around various Blue Zone concepts, along with incorporating philosophies of Chinese medicine and Japanese dining. The Mather’s forward-thinking design has helped attract younger older adults, with three-fourths of the community’s current residents are either boomers or Gen X-ers.
“It’s typically very difficult to achieve that in senior living, so that’s been one of the most exciting aspects for me to see when I visited,” Mather CEO Mary Leary told me earlier this year. “When we envisioned this project, we wanted to attract the next generation of older adults and it’s been very well-received.”
Reflecting on Serenbe’s plans, I think there is an opportunity for senior living operators to go even bolder with their designs. With the rise of wellness in senior living, the term also has taken on a somewhat ambiguous meaning. Based on operators’ stated plans, “wellness” can be anything from plant-based foods in the dining room and spa treatments to care coordination and preventative healthcare.
Lifespace Communities CEO Jesse Jantzen recently said that while good care represents “table stakes” in senior living, the real “differentiator” is wellness. But I think wellness can only serve as a differentiator if senior living operators truly offer something different from their competitors.
I don’t think that means companies necessarily need to develop hotels, schools or commercial spaces on their campus. But I do think that more operators should ponder what they really mean when they invoke the word wellness, and try to differentiate their services accordingly.
Data on loneliness, unhappiness show more opportunities for wellness in senior living
The senior living industry has an important role to play in keeping older adults from feeling lonely or unhappy, and recent surveys support that conclusion. But I think recent data shows there’s even more senior living operators can do, including with regard to wellness in their communities.
Chronic illness, mental health and physical health are all factors in driving chronic loneliness in older adults.
In 2023, more than a third of older adults between 50 and 80 reported feeling isolated from others at least some of the time, a decrease from 2020 figures (56%) but still above levels reported in 2018 (27%), according to University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging. The report also found that 37% of older adults between 50 and 80 felt a lack of companionship in 2023, compared to 34% in 2018.
The University of Michigan poll also found that about one-third of older adults between 50 and 80 have infrequent contact, defined as once a week or less, with people outside of their home in 2023, which is up from 28% in 2018.
Loneliness remains particularly high among older adults with fair or poor mental health, the report states, with 77% reporting feeling isolated and 52% of older adults with fair or poor physical health reporting feelings of isolation.
Serenbe’s Nygren cited the U.S. drop in the 2025 World Happiness Report to the lowest ranking ever of 24th out of 146 countries, a decrease from 2012 when the U.S. ranked 11th, as among the reasons for the company’s ambitious vision.
Health care costs are also ballooning, as U.S. health care spending accounted for 17.3% of gross domestic product in 2022 and increased 7.5% to $14,570 per capita in 2023, according to the American Medical Association.
Senior living communities can play a role in helping keep residents well and potentially lead to better health outcomes. A 2024 NORC study found that communal senior housing is associated with greater longevity versus residing in the community at large.
But there is wide variation in those figures, with residents in the top 25% of senior living communities living more than two months longer on average than residents in the bottom 25% of communities. While I don’t have any data to this end, I wonder how much wellness and chronic condition management helped make that difference between the top and bottom communities.
Of course, there are still numerous challenges to more wellness-forward designs. For one, building out-of-the-box ideas often requires new construction or extensive renovations to an existing property. As senior living development remains tough and financing for new projects remains scarce, I think there is only so much senior living companies can do to think outside the box, at least by building anew.
I think Juniper’s Connect4Life program along with other value-based care efforts present a possible way forward for wellness that doesn’t include ground-up development, but such plans also require careful planning, good data collection and operational precision.
Still, at the end of the day, I think there is an opportunity for senior living companies that want to grow bigger in wellness. It will require operators, investors and owners to take on more risk, think creatively and problem-solve along the way. But the good news is that projects like Serenbe should push the envelope and serve as inspiration for what is possible for those leaders and organizations that are willing to challenge the status quo.
