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Leading a senior living operator and flying an F-15 fighter jet are alike in that they both require careful planning – and sometimes, laser precision.
Nick Stengle, who joined Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) as CEO last October, knows that lesson better than maybe any leader in the industry. Long before he joined Brookdale or worked in an adjacent field, he was a pilot and instructor at the famed Top Gun school in the U.S. military. Like executing a sortie in a fighter jet, making big moves in senior living requires a lot of forethought, analysis and a long, careful debriefing period to study what went right and what went wrong.
“We execute that plan, we have great contingencies built in, but then we will talk about the execution,” Stengle said during an appearance last week on SHN+ TALKS. “The idea is we will do it even better the next time around.”
He is bringing that philosophy to lead the nation’s largest operator as it turns to its next chapter. Stengle has already reorganized the company’s management business into effectively six different operating companies. The company also has named leaders, such as a new COO, to help divide up that workload. Stengle also has helped continue the operator’s focus on owning communities that offer needs-based services like assisted living and memory care.
Brookdale has in the last decade slimmed down to 517 today, representing half of its largest size of about 1,100 communities. In 2026, the Brentwood, Tennessee-based operator is done downsizing, and even selectively seeking to expand in certain markets where it already has a presence.
With regard to operations, Brookdale has rebounded from the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The company in 2026 is seeing its lowest associate and executive director turnover rate since then, Stengle said. All the while, occupancy is trending upward as the operator builds momentum.
“From an overall perspective, across 41 states, these are the best conditions we have seen since Covid,” Stengle.
SHN is pleased to share this recording and transcript of the SHN+ TALKS conversation with SHN+ members.
In this conversation, you will learn about:
- Brookdale’s growth strategy after a decade of shrinking
- Stengle’s thoughts on adopting new technology practices
- How running a senior living company is like flying a military jet
- Brookdale’s philosophy for staffing
- What Brookdale is planning for the remainder of 2026
The following interview has been edited for clarity. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the full video of the SHN+ TALKS interview.
SHN Senior Editor SHN Regan: Can you update us on what you’re focusing on right now as the CEO of Brookdale Senior Living?
Nick Stengle: First, thank you for inviting me, and thanks everyone for joining and showing interest in Brookdale specifically and the senior living industry, more broadly.
You mentioned we are the largest operator, and that truly is the case, but I also want to highlight that we’re the third-largest owner of senior living real estate. That’s behind the two big publicly traded REITs, Welltower and Ventas, respectively. And I mention that because it truly aligns with what we are focused on right now. First and foremost, we are an operating company, but we’re built upon a foundation of very specialized real estate that is becoming more and more scarce with every passing quarter, with the overall kind of supply and demand tailwinds that exist in our space.
So, practically, what does that mean? First, we’re changing how we are structured. Step one was me coming in as CEO after having been president and COO of some very large, adjacent companies in hospice and home health. We hired a COO, which we did back in November, realigning to our six-region model with dedicated regional leadership teams.
We just recently realigned our reporting relationships, all the way from the executive ranks down through our COO, our regions, our districts and into the communities. We are fundamentally taking what we call our headquarters, our community support center, and making sure it lives up to its name, truly supporting each community. Because at the end of the day, we are a company of 517 individual communities, all running with their own cultures, their own communities, as the name implies, all underneath the umbrella of Brookdale.
Really, what I’m describing is a cultural shift, and that’s what we’ve been focused on with my arrival, with the COO’s arrival and the entire management team.
Concurrently, we’re also focused on evolving our real estate portfolio. A lot of that has been modifying and optimizing the real estate that we do have to ensure that we’re where we want to be, owning the real estate we want to own, owning the locations we want to own, being in the leases that we want to be in. And we’re doing all this, really, to capture those tailwinds in the most effective way possible.
SHN: Can you update us on the financial and operational health of Brookdale right now, and then share any metrics that would exemplify where you’re at?
Stengle: I would argue, and our numbers show it, that we’re the strongest we have been in many years; for sure, since Covid. We publicly disclose it all and as a publicly traded company, you can see our numbers are the strongest in the most recent year.
Just a few metrics: First, we grew our EBITDA, our profit metric, by 19% in 2025 as compared to 2024, and then that momentum has continued through in the first quarter of 2026 and we expect, based on our guidance, for the remainder of the year.
That was underpinned by a 2.3 percentage point occupancy growth, when you compare all of 2025 to all of 2024. And that included a 5.7% increase in RevPAR (revenue per available room).
We generated positive free cash flow last year for the first time in many years, for sure since Covid but even before Covid. And that’s after deploying $171 million of capital into our communities.
So not only do we spend more to invest in the physical plant and on the buildings themselves, we still generated a meaningful positive free cash flow [after] we had been burning cash flow for many years. And those are the real kind of hard knocks, you know, the brass tacks type numbers. But the more interesting thing is the underpinning of those numbers, and I want to share some of those.
So right now, we have the lowest executive director turnover that we’ve had this quarter than we’ve had in recent history, and by recent history, really, since Covid. We have the lowest overall associate turnovers since even before Covid.
And then on the flip side, from a customer engagement and resident experience perspective, we do a very nice job monitoring this objectively through an NPS – net promoter score – system. We’ve had the highest since Covid. That ties directly to move-outs decreasing.
So as you look at all the hard financial numbers, the capital we’re deploying, our profit, our RevPAR, our EBITDA, they all look great. But even the leading indicators of this idea that we’re an operating company first and foremost, a company of people caring and serving people, all our people metrics are really shining a bright green light, so I feel strongly positive about where Brookdale has been in the past few quarters and where we’re going for the rest of the year.
SHN: How is Brookdale growing this year?
Stengle: Over the last 12 years, going back to 2014, we were at 1,150 communities. And in the next several months, we will be down to 517. So, if you do the math, we are less than half of the size we were 12 years ago, and we still have a handful of communities we have to dispose of.
I had a bar graph that I presented on our investor day, I presented it internally to our own associates. Every year, the number of communities has gone down, and down, and down. Finally, after 12 years of this, we should see a flat bar in 2027 as compared to 2026, and maybe an ever-so-slightly increasing bar.
We are looking to do targeted acquisitions in markets that we already operate in. Just to make this even more clear, today we’re in 41 states. We have zero desire to be in 42 states. That is a growth strategy other competitors, other peers may have. We are more than happy to be in the 41 states we’re in. We’re in 125 markets, plus or minus, no desire to be in 126.
What we want to do is take the markets that we are already in where we have strength, where we have a good leadership team, but we might have a void in a specific part of that market. And in our investor day,, we gave two illustrative examples – one in Dallas-Fort Worth, one in Kansas City – where we showed the layout of our existing communities. We showed that there’s a real gap in certain parts of the city where we don’t have a Brookdale flag.
For example, in Kansas City, on the Missouri side of the border, we’re quite thin as compared to the Kansas side of the border. So when you look at IL versus memory care and AL, there is a real weakness there. So we are looking to make acquisitions of a single community or two communities in a specific market.
Typically, I’m going to argue it’s going to be suboptimally performing, maybe with an operator who’s more focused somewhere else where that’s not one of their core markets but it’s a focus market for us. We will gladly pay an appropriate price, and operate it within the construct of the larger strategy. And one of the points I’ve been making internally and externally is we’re not just looking to win community by community, we’re looking to win markets. And this acquisition strategy aligns with this idea that we want to win markets in the 125 markets that we’re in.
SHN: Do you look at things like median occupancy versus average occupancy in a market, and do you have thoughts about figuring out the real occupancy upside of a community?
Stengle: We do look at both. As communities fill up, the median and the average might start separating, because you have a long tail on the lower end of average as they wait to get to 100. Instead of taking the average or the mean of individual communities, we just take the overall market into account.
So, instead of looking at an average of individual communities, we just take a look at the total number of units in a market as the denominator that is available over the total number of units that are occupied in that same market, whether it’s in 10 communities or 100 communities.
And really, it’s the inverse that’s more interesting. How many are unoccupied? And that’s where the real value is. So, when we look at markets, and we’re looking at how we want to win in this market, and here’s the strategy, really we’re looking at the overall market, and not necessarily an average or mean of individual communities within that market.
SHN: Why is ownership the way to go for an operator like Brookdale?
Stengle: When you look at it by unit count, we’re actually 75% owned, 25% triple-net lease.
We’re basically out of the managed business, so we’re almost exclusively – with a very small exception – owned and triple-net lease now. There are three reasons we really like owning. The first one is that there’s a direct linkage – the work, the people, the effort, the investment you make – when you own all those efforts.
The real economic value you generate, it accretes to you, as opposed to somebody else, the landlord or the owner of the properties that you’re managing. So when you think of all the efforts, all the changes we’ve made, it feels very good that we’re able to do that on a base of our own own owned communities, so we get the full value, the full economic value of all that effort.
The second part that’s nice is you get to own your own destiny. You have a choice, when you own it, whether you stay, whether you dispose, whether you continue investing – you own your own destiny, truly.
Now, in leases, you sort of also own it. We just redid many of our leases. They have fairly long terms. They’re fairly sticky. In fact, some of our leases, we even have a purchase option that we’re going to contemplate, which then will pivot us to ownership. But there’s nothing like owning and then secondarily, leasing, to really own your destiny.
And then the third point is the scarcity of this real estate. This is a very specialized asset. It’s very hard to convert another asset into this asset. As we’ve now seen with the development pipeline, it’s very hard to develop this asset, and we own it, so it feels really good at this very moment that we own the predominance of our real estate, that we can own our own destiny, and we can really gain the value of our efforts to our shareholders and to our company.
SHN: Brookdale is also geared toward needs-based communities, assisted living and memory care. Why is that?
Stengle: We’re 75% on the needs-based side – a mix of assisted living, memory care – and then 25% IL. When you think of our peers, for sure, the overall national numbers, I think it’s closer to 50-50. So even though we do have exposure to IL, we are definitely balanced on the needs-based side.
That is the foundation that Brookdale is built upon. We’re built upon great care, great service, and that’s how we choose to differentiate ourselves. Whether it’s our Optimum Life programming, our memory care programming or HealthPlus, we have chosen to really over-index on the care and service we provide. And AL and memory care are very well aligned to that mentality. Now, I will tell you, 15 years ago, the position we’re in today actually put us at a slight disadvantage, and that’s because IL was exposed to the baby boomers, slightly earlier.
In IL, typically, you’ll move in three to four years earlier than you will AL. So, typically, IL occupancies have always been a little bit higher when compared to AL and memory care. Again, 10 years ago, that didn’t feel so great. But I will tell you today, as we’re sitting here and baby boomers are turning 80, we are now entering a sweet spot of when they seek and when they need assisted living or memory care. And the good part, from a business perspective, and also the good part, because we provide a great need, is that this decision is typically not discretionary.
You can forgo independent living, you can delay it. But that gets further and further from the truth the closer you are to assisted living and, for sure, memory care. And, by the way, there aren’t really good alternatives, and the alternatives that do exist can often be far more costly than the assisted living or memory care scenario.
Our exposure to assisted living and memory care also provides a bit of a defensive moat in spite of everything else that might be occurring macroeconomically, whether it’s our economy or senior living. It feels good to be in the space we’re in right now, where we’re further away from the discretionary side of the equation.
SHN: Tell our audience about HealthPlus and what your plans are with it.
Stengle: HealthPlus is fully aligned with everything I just said. We differentiate ourselves with our care and our service. We differentiate ourselves with our assisted living memory care mix, so all those things are very well aligned. A program like HealthPlus is very closely aligned with being able to truly do that differentiation that I’m describing.
The reality is that residents have many healthcare needs and their ability to access healthcare sometimes can get curtailed when they’re in an assisted living scenario, or even more so in a memory care scenario. So we help, through HealthPlus, navigate what can be a very confusing landscape as you get older, as you get further removed from your ability to transport yourself, et cetera.
There’s a direct programmatic link with many of the other providers of health care that come and visit our residents, and I’m thinking of primary care physician groups, especially those in value-based arrangements. I’m thinking of home health, of hospice, of outpatient rehabilitation, all the different services that occur. HealthPlus helps provide that linkage to the much larger healthcare ecosystem that exists outside of our four walls, and is able to bring it in a very focused, comprehensive, deliberate way to each of our residents. At the end of the day, it provides for better care, better service for the residents. From an economic perspective, it provides us a longer length of stay, a happier resident and a more engaged resident, a better community, a better culture – all the benefits are really a win-win-win.
Then on the front end, it’s also something that we market and can sell, because there are residents, there are family members that are seeking that care and seeking that coordination that we’re able to provide.
SHN: Tell us about the role that you think senior living plays in the overall health care care continuum.
Stengle: It’s been fascinating to see how this has evolved over the years as value-based type structures become more and more important in our healthcare system, specifically on the elder side of healthcare. So, the first point I want to make, Brookdale and most senior living operators don’t tap in directly to these payment structures or these incentives, but we very directly help impact them. The relationship, the actual money flow, typically runs through an MA plan, or an ACO REACH primary care physician provider group, or an MSSP. So there are vehicles. We don’t tap directly, but indirectly we do.
Our residents are with us 24/7. We see them with our own eyes, we see how they’re eating, we see how they’re reacting. We’re seeing how they feel. We see the pain, we see the joy; we can see them in a far more holistic way, a more comprehensive way, than any primary care physician, NP, specialist can ever see, because we’re with our residents 24/7. That’s really what we lean into. We have all the numbers where programs like HealthPlus can truly decrease hospitalizations, truly decrease ER visits because of that ability to bring all the healthcare in. But I will argue, even where you don’t have HealthPlus, you just have so many more touchpoints where you can assess a change in a resident and foresee a problem before even a family member or someone else can.
So it’s everything from the food we provide, the dining, the great nutrition. It’s medication management and adherence. It’s catching all those early signs of something going on and maybe interceding. For sure, we do that with family members, but also really by plugging into the broader healthcare ecosystem. We are the warning sign that, hey, something is awry here, and we have a process to highlight that. And that’s where HealthPlus comes into mind. But even outside of HealthPlus, just being in senior living, you have that power, you have that strength, and if anything, that’s part of the service you are providing to these residents.
SHN: Is there anything you can say about EngagementPlus and how that fits into some of what we’ve talked about?
Stengle: HealthPlus is more easy to describe, because there’s real objective, quantifiable things we can measure around hospitalization rates, and ER visits and move-outs because of acuity needs. But I would argue even EngagementPlus has a similar amount of value, and it’s around having our residents be more engaged in the daily activities that exist in their community, and having a more meaningful presence within their community, within their own lives. And the way we measure that is through our net promoter score. I hinted at that earlier and how well it’s going. Our EngagementPlus programming is a big part of that.
Then you also tie it to being able to reduce what we call our controllable move-outs, because residents are more engaged and they have more friends. But then there’s also a healthcare component around loneliness and some other things that, again, are a little harder to measure. But there’s some real math and there are some real studies that show that congregate living can really help defer and delay cognitive impairment and the progression of that, and that’s exactly part of what our EngagementPlus programming is all about. At the end of the day, it’s about just living your most meaningful life while you’re with us at Brookdale.
SHN: When Brookdale has an older property, what is your philosophy for breathing new life into it?
Stengle: I think our average age is right at 26, 27 years old, for our buildings, and I will tell you, not only are they not obsolete, they’re not far from obsolete.In fact, they’re even far from just merely being functional.
I’ll tell you, they can be very desirable. And they can be very desirable when you have a deliberate, programmatic capital investment program. I hinted at the $171 million of capital we spent last year. We’re looking to do even more this year. In fact, we’ve publicly disclosed that we’re projecting to spend somewhere between $175 and $195 million on capital improvement in these 517 communities that are, on average, 25, 26 or 27 years old.
And the way you really make it work is by doing comprehensive programmatic-type investments. So instead of taking a piecemeal approach, where you divvy up $100,000 here, $200,000 there. We use the phrase “first impression,” where you change everything in the common areas, typically, but also in the room. So it’s things like lighting, the carpeting, the furniture. You rework existing footprint, where there might be a dead space or a little corner, where all you need to do is put a bar or an espresso machine, staff it for six hours a day, and all of a sudden you have an amazing bistro with residents waiting up in line. That reflects really well during a tour. So it’s making decisions like that, which the hotel industry does beautifully.
I was in a hotel at an investor conference in Miami, it was a 35-year-old hotel, and they were absolutely beautiful. Amazing location, old building, but a lot of investment every 10 or so years into those buildings, into those hotels. It’s the exact same concept that we are applying at Brookdale, where we will take our buildings and make them more than just functional, and make them actually be very desirable with the investment and the wherewithal that we have.
SHN: What’s your take on affordability and making senior living more affordable for its prospective residents?
Stengle: We’re kind of down the fairway when it comes to the price point, so we’re far from the luxury segment. Today, a lot of the development is at price points that are, 50%, 60%, 70%, 100% higher than anything we would charge, but then we’re also far from the kind of the economic minimal services.
We’re right down the middle, and it kind of goes back in line with this idea that we’ve differentiated ourselves with our services and our care in assisted living and memory care, which is a pretty high-touch, very people-intensive component to the service we provide. So when I think of the word affordability, it’s this idea of, what is the alternative to the service and the care we provide? The paper you mentioned from ASHA does a very nice job of putting different scenarios where sometimes home-based care might make sense.
But at some point, that scale starts tipping, and usually the scale starts tipping because the care the resident needs becomes more and more difficult to accomplish in a one-off scenario within the house. So, you have to take into account the room and the board. You have to take into account the care itself, the core part of the care that you’re providing, and as we all age, and our needs increase, that care increases and the cost increases. Again, that’s when that scale starts tipping very quickly towards assisted living memory care being the right answer. Oh, by the way, on top of that, it’s more than just care. It is the housekeeping, it is the laundry, it is the activities, it is the transportation.
As an industry, we don’t typically do that, other than to highlight all the great stuff that you are getting and how you are removing the burden of home ownership, removing the burden of having to figure this out on your own. That’s where the real affordability metric occurs. Again, I would welcome folks to read the ASHA report. I think it does a very nice job of trying to create a balanced view where home-based care might make sense, but eventual solution, typically, for many people is assisted living or memory care. It’s the better option for sure, economically, but I would argue even from a community perspective and an engagement perspective, and from the perspective of living your most meaningful life, as opposed to being alone by yourself in the house.
SHN: Let’s take an audience question. They asked, what is your timeframe for first impression updates and unit updates? How do you go about unit upgrades if they’re occupied?
Stengle: Typically, you upgrade a unit when it turns over. The average length of stay in our industry and in our company is around two years, so typically you’re able to upgrade it every two years. And the upgrades can be everything from the carpeting, for sure, but also painting the fixtures, the bathroom, the kitchenette, countertops, granite, all those types of things. There’s been a move to open, expand spaces, remove intervening walls. That’s something that baby boomers seem to love more than previous generations. So those are all typical things that we can do fairly easily.
We do have residents who’ve been with us multiple years – three, four, five, six years – and if they are willing to go to another unit for a week or two or three because they want us to upgrade their unit, we can do that as well. So even if it’s occupied, there is the opportunity, but we would only do that with the residents’ desire and them raising their hand and saying they want to do it, because it would be a little bit of a disruption in their life. So typically we wait for natural turnover to do that.
As far as the overall rhythm, 10 years is more of a hotel number. I worked for Marriott for several years, and the typical capital planning deployment plan is every 10 years. I think in senior living, you might need to do it maybe a bit quicker, just because it’s a lived-in product. Wheelchairs and walkers are a lot of activity coming in and out, and sometimes that might ding things up a little bit more quickly.
But the real point is, have a timeline and have a comprehensive approach to it, as opposed to a piecemeal approach, which is really the big pivot that we’ve been going through. And instead of just focusing on one small need, let’s fix the entire first impression in the lobby, in the common areas, in the hallways, all the while the units themselves are constantly being upgraded with every unit turn.
SHN: How is Brookdale using technology in its communities right now? And how are you budgeting for it?
Stengle: I think I get at least 10 emails a day, unsolicited cold call emails. They all have AI in their title now. In the last three to four years, all of a sudden, everyone’s an AI expert. There’s a lot of noise in some sense, but some real diamonds within that noise. This is where we, as an industry and as Brookdale, have to be very careful that we don’t just try and grab on to the first shiny, flashy thing without truly vetting it out.
The way we’ve approached our technology is really in a few buckets. The first bucket is on the sales and marketing side. I think there’s some exciting stuff that occurs with AI, especially with phone agents and helping the sales and marketing engine. Things like recording tours and then having it tied directly into the CRM and also to help provide feedback to the sales manager, the sales director, on how they could have more effectively run that tour. So there are some exciting things around the discovery in the education of the customer into senior living.
Once they do call, we are making that as seamless as possible to get to the tour, and once the tour occurs, we have a more holistic and distilled view on what the good, the bad of that tour was for that specific prospective resident and for our sales manager, that sales director, that sales rep, so that they can be more effective with future residents.
The next interesting step is around the clinical side. Again, I keep hitting how we are an assisted living memory care heavy company, so we have a strong service clinical component. So there are some exciting things that occur through ambient listening, where you, as you talk to a resident, or as a resident’s talking to you, you can distill insights in the way we do our documentation, the way we do our assessments.
The part that excites me the most is I think the merger of cameras and optical sensors with AI to go even beyond a step of what has already been implemented over the last 10, 15, 20 years. We’re well-positioned because we’re there 24-7, but we’re not really there 24-7. We don’t have our eye on the resident in all situations, but can you do some cameras in a very non-intrusive way, with full privacy rights, all protected, but still do some amazing things? So that’s where we’re excited.
As far as how we budget for it, typically there is a productivity effort or effectiveness. At the end of the day, I do believe technology is important, so we will spend the money we need to to be as effective, as capable as we can, and the numbers will make sense in the long run.
SHN: How are staffing conditions at Brookdale and what are you doing to attract and retain workers in 2026?
Stengle: Brookdale is fundamentally, like other operators, a company that cares for and serves people. So I’m glad you asked this question, because we can never underestimate or overlook that. In fact, the fact that it came on the heels of a technology and productivity question is even more perfect, because even as technology makes us humans more productive, more effective, the human element is critical, and we can never lose sight of that. From an overall perspective, across 41 states, these are the best conditions we have seen since Covid.
The number of applicants we have per position, kind of at a record high. We have the lowest turnover we’ve seen since Covid – still too high, arguably, so I don’t want to say we’ve won, there’s still a lot more to do. So there’s a lot that is working really well at this very moment from our perspective.
When you go into specific markets, there are maybe a half a dozen or so that are still quite problematic. But in total, as a company of our size, where we get to see 41 states worth of employment pools, it feels about as good as it has felt in a very long time.
Now, part of the reason is, I think there’s an overall macroeconomic thing that we don’t control, but there are also a lot of things that we control internally, and a lot of it has to do with the cultural shift that I described earlier. So for us, it’s around this idea that we have a community support center, which does exactly that. It supports the community. It’s everything from recruiting, learning and development, the training, the nurturing, the fostering, the great hiring, the great onboarding. We’ve really pivoted a lot of work in that, and it’s showing up in our numbers.
A lot of our training and development efforts are, first and foremost, right in front of every one of our community associates. I’ve done eight roadshows by my count, since I joined just under eight months ago. For example, I might go to the Dallas-Fort Worth market and meet all the executive directors in that market, where we have about 23 communities. If they’re within about a two hour driving distance, they’ll drive in and we’ll spend an hour, or two or three hours, together as a group. I’ve done that in Denver, in Phoenix, in Columbus, Jacksonville, Kansas City, New Jersey – I hope I got them all.
One of the coolest things that we do as a company, which I think aligns very nicely with this labor staffing thing, is we have a great development pipeline for all our associates. I get most excited when I meet an ED who says to me, ‘15 years ago, I joined this company as a part-time caregiver, I did that for a year or two. I became a full-time business office manager. I did that for a year or two, and then I became the dining services coordinator, and now I am the ED.’
We have so many stories of folks in different trajectories and pathways, and I will tell you, it’s things like that that attract great talent, and more importantly, retain amazing talent, which is exactly what we’re doing at Brookdale, and why our numbers are as good as they are, within that space.
SHN: We had another audience question on growth. Anything you want to add on that front?
Stengle: First things first, we’re not shrinking anymore. That’s step one. So, we have hit the trough. While you can never use words like always and never in a business context, we pretty much are done with this idea that we’re going to shrink. So that’s kind of the first step.
The second step is acquiring targeted, specific communities in targeted, specific areas. So, it’s not opportunistic. We’re not just waiting and something falls in our lap. No, we want to be deeper in the Kansas City market, which we are already in.
We will go seek potential communities that may or may not be on the market, and we will attempt to purchase them if it makes sense at the right price and the right return. Developing new communities, we’re not in that game. And I think we would be very hard-pressed, even if we were in that game, to develop new communities. And I will say converting other real estate into senior living real estate, especially assisted living and memory care, is probably even more expensive and more risky than just developing. So that’s not something we do either. So clearly, we will acquire existing memory care assisted living communities.
SHN: You’re a former fighter pilot, which I did not know. You actually have experience at the Top Gun School, which I found really interesting. When I think of fighter pilots, I think of people who are calm under pressure and able to make hard decisions. How would you describe the kind of leader you are at Brookdale in relation to all that?
Stengle: The part that you miss is also very good at beach volleyball. All kidding aside, so yeah, I did fly the F-15E Strike Eagle for the Air Force for 11 years. I was an instructor pilot at the Top Gun School. I will tell you, the more interesting part about being a fighter pilot – and sometimes Hollywood kind of doesn’t catch this, or it gets a little sensationalized – fighter pilots are very good at creating plans.
Missing planning is a very meaningful part of what it means to be a fighter pilot, especially at the level I was able to achieve, where I was a mission commander and an instructor pilot at the Top Gun School. It’s just as much about stick and rudder, which is the exciting part, as it is about the actual planning. So creating a plan and being very deliberate is very important. Being able to articulate that plan via very clear objectives with very clear contingency planning is very important. That’s called the brief.
You do have to execute the plan, but then, I will tell you, being a fighter pilot is more about the debrief than anything else. So an average fighter pilot sortie in a training environment is about an hour, hour and a half. I would spend seven, eight, nine hours debriefing that one-hour sortie. So we would spend eight hours as a group playing back everything. Every five seconds, pause. Why’d you do this? Why did you choose to do this? This was the better option. So I will tell you, of all the things that I think I bring in my leadership style, it’s this idea that we have a plan. We execute that plan, we have great contingencies built in, but then we will talk about the execution, and we will assess, because the idea is we will do it even better the next time around.
And the real fundamental part, though – and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this is – whether you’re a fighter pilot as an officer in the military, at the end of the day, it’s about people leading people. So this idea that Brookdale and the senior living company is a company of people that care for people.
As an officer, I had that opportunity to lead people at a very young age, and that’s really what I bring to the table, is about leading an organization where people matter, but mission matters maybe even a little bit more.
SHN: What does the rest of 2026 look like for Brookdale? As I’m watching the company, what should I expect to see out of the operator next?
Stengle: I’ll end it how I started it.
We are a people company, we are an operating company that is built upon a foundation of very scarce real estate. And that’s what in 2026, and really the future of the company, is really centered around. So the first part is real estate. We need to stabilize our portfolio, and we will in the next several months. We have a handful of dispositions we still have to get through. We will hit the 517. At that point, we will be fully stabilized for the first time in over a decade, which then gives us the freedom and the latitude to lean into even more of the people side.
We’ve gone through a lot of change since I joined, even preceding me when I stepped in as the new CEO. And change is hard despite it being amazingly timely, amazingly important. So the further we can get that change behind us, the more we will be able to optimize who we are as an organization, and really start performing even better than we have already, so sort of building upon that momentum that we’ve already built. So fundamentally, SHN, occupancy growth.
We’re at 82.3% occupancy today, so we have about 18 points of runway ahead of us to get to 100% occupancy and achieve what many of our communities already have. So that is a goal.
Now, there are milestones in between here: 84% is a good one, that’s where we were just prior to Covid; 89% is a good one because that’s where we were just prior to the Emeritus acquisition back in 2014; then eventually 100%.
All the while, expanding our profit, our NOI and our EBITDA, doing some targeted acquisitions for sure, but to wrap it all together, we want to be the most attractive employer of choice. We want to develop and retain the most amazing associates, and the rest of it will all fall in line as long as we can stay focused on those things.
SHN reporter Andrew Christman also contributed writing to this article