If all goes according to plan, senior living operator Galerie Living will “explode” with new growth and business lines in the coming year and beyond, according to CEO Tim Gary.
The company’s first and only currently open Corso community, Corso Atlanta, is almost fully occupied with net operating income margins in the “mid-40s” percentile range. With that momentum at its back, the company is readying five new Corso projects across the U.S. in markets including Atlanta, Philadelphia and in the D.C. area, with a focus on luxurious amenities and services for residents.
Separate from Galerie and Corso, Gary is also CEO of Fynn, a senior living operations tech platform with about 50 clients across the country in 2024. Next year, Gary said the technology company has expectations to scale that number up to 400 as more operators come aboard, with an even larger goal beyond that.
Looking ahead to the coming year, Gary expects to be plenty busy – in a good way – with the expansion of Corso and the Finn platform. The company also may take on new third-party contracts to help other companies develop, design or manage luxury senior living projects.
“You’re going to see us explode in our development of luxury senior housing. You’re going to see the growth of our technology platform, Finn, really explode,” he told Senior Housing News. “We’re not just a one-box-fits-all company, we look at a lot of opportunities.”
Inside Corso brand expansion
Galerie currently has five Corso projects teed up in a handful of markets. In addition to Corso, Galerie also manages three communities under the Village Park brand name.
In Atlanta, the company is expanding its presence with another development phase at its original Corso community. The company is also planning another community nearby called Corso Druid Hills.
In the D.C. area, Galerie has Corso projects planned in both Tysons, Virginia, and Chevy Chase, Maryland. And in Philadelphia, Galerie is moving forward with a new community dubbed Corso St. Charles Borromeo.
Renderings of planned Corso Tysons project in Tysons, Virginia; rendering courtesy Galerie LivingCorso communities are all designed with unique architectural motifs. For example, Corso Atlanta borrows inspiration from Parisian streets lined with private gardens, gas lamps and fountains.
They are also designed with “neural architecture,” meaning spaces that anticipate and mesh with human behaviors. That might take the form of rooms that act as transition to other spaces within the community using lighting and different colors, for example.
“When you blend the people with the architecture, all of a sudden, you have a magical community,” Gary said. “It takes a lot of thought with your operations team and your architects. And so while there’s a desire to go toward an easier design, if you just hold the line and stick to the principles of putting seniors first, then you will come out with a beautiful product, and you preserve the dignity of the residents.”
Getting to the finish line with new development requires patience and diligence – and these days, additional pre-development investments totaling between $10 million and $14 million per project, Gary said. To win over banks that might be wary of lending for new projects, Galerie invests in details such as drawings, market studies and pricing “deep dives.”
“It takes that money up front to really be able to present to a bank … that you’ve got everything in order,” he said. “This year, banks are willing to do construction lending – last year they were not.”
He added that getting construction financing to match yield cost is an ongoing struggle, given that inflation has put a dent in operators’ yield costs. That is why it’s important to show lenders that projects have potential to expand and aren’t just “stuck” in their current footprints.
“If you have a phase two or phase three to your project, what you can show the banks is, ‘Hey, my yield cost is a little bit lower than what I want it to be – call it 7.5% today,” he said. “But when I build phase two, I’m back to 9% and 10%. Once they can see that, they’re more willing to weather the interest rate cycle.”
Underpinning the company’s plans to grow its Corso brand is the fact that luxury senior living communities are still in high demand, and the fact that the rate of senior living development is still lagging compared to the anticipated need of the incoming generation of older adults.
And while Corso and Galerie are focused on luxury, Gary also sees the writing on the wall with regard to the need to serve middle-income older adults in the years ahead.
Some time ago, he worked with Wal-Mart for a period of about two years to develop new health care products for middle-income older adults. From that experience he came away with the notion that other companies, such as health systems, pharmaceutical companies, retail companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs), must be part of the solution to serve the middle-market.
“At some point, those big guys are going to come to senior housing and say, ‘Hey, help us get access to this data,” Gary said. “We’ve got to push toward them in the hopes that we get their attention so that the Amazons and the Apples and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world can meet us in the middle and create some really powerful joint ventures.”
Staffing is another big piece of the puzzle, especially for Galerie given the higher quality standards of luxury senior living and a more affluent clientele. To that end, the company has a training program called Galerie University that all workers must go through.
Galerie also uses technology to track staff workloads, with the intention of using that data to support them if their burden becomes too great or they start burning out at work.
“I’m not going to allow [staff] to be overworked and burn out, because your good ones will get overworked and your bad ones will just hang out,” he said.
Galerie’s growing Fynn platform
Outside of growing the Corso brand in 2025, Gary is also laser-focused on expanding Galerie’s sister company and tech platform, Fynn.
The electronic health record (EHR) platform was built specifically for senior living operators, with capabilities ranging from onboarding staff and communicating with families to administering medications and tracking resident activities of daily living (ADLs).
Data collection and access is a big centerpiece of the platform, and Gary noted that if the platform “took in four communities over a six month time frame, we would collect around 20 million data points.”
“It’s going to be really important for operators to have access to that data so that they can understand what they need to make a building perform better,” he said.
Fynn was redeveloped several times in the last few years, and now is ready to deploy in more senior living communities. While Galerie expects to get to 400 clients in 2025, beyond that he sees a roadmap to deploy it in thousands more communities.