Less than three years after the launch of the Senior Living Transformation Company, its leaders say the company and model are at an “inflection point” and ready to expand in a big way.
The company’s model serves as an alternative to operators working with real estate investment trusts (REITs) or private-equity investors. SLTC invests in senior living properties and companies to create value and alignment across ownership, operations and health care. The idea is to create a mutually beneficial arrangement for senior living community stakeholders using a model underpinned by data and technology to better care for residents.
In 2023, the company with Omega Healthcare Investors (NYSE: OHI) acquired a 113-bed assisted living community in Brentwood, Tennessee to serve as the testing grounds for its tech-forward strategy. The company’s leaders said they have learned multiple lessons in the years since then, and believe the company is now ready to take its investment strategy to its next stage.
Earlier this month, in partnership with Sabal Investment Holdings and Juniper Communities, the company acquired The Villages of Windcrest, an 81-unit assisted living and memory care community in Fredericksburg, Texas. With that acquisition behind them, SLTC’s leaders believe that the company is at a critical crossroads in 2026 and are raising capital to that end. They foresee “hockey-stick shaped” growth ahead with a pipeline of likely deals totaling between $300 million and $600 million.
Formation Capital Founder Arnold Whitman is SLTC’s founder and executive chairman. Also leading SLTC is a group of senior living operator veterans that includes Generations LLC President Chip Gabriel. Last year, SLTC acquired Centered Care and appointed former Pine Park Health exec Jim Lydiard to lead it as CEO. Rounding out SLTC’s leadership is senior living investor Frank Small, who is founder and managing principal at 12 North Capital.
“When we started talking about doing this, a lot of people rolled their eyes and said, ‘Well, you’re trying to boil the ocean,’” Whitman told Senior Housing News. “Today, there’s a much more open-minded audience that is receptive to this integration of tech-enabled health care … and we think we’ve got the right team.”
Lessons learned
SLTC’s new growth period ahead is informed by years of honing its model at its community in Brentwood.
Senior living operators across the acuity spectrum are already caring for residents living with multiple chronic conditions. At the same time, there are new value-based payment structures that operators can tap into to fund and even profit from new services that improve quality of care.
For example, operators like Bloomfield, New Jersey-based Juniper Communities have in the past proven its care coordination and delivery model can both improve care outcomes and bolster its occupancy, length of stay and margins. Similarly, leaders of Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) have in the past said that communities offering its care coordination model, HealthPlus, have benefitted from fewer urgent care visits and hospitalizations and an ability to more quickly become profitable.
In its Brentwood, Tennessee, community, SLTC worked with operator Kalven Senior Living, and later, Bickford Senior Living, to create a care model that worked within value-based frameworks and led to better resident outcomes. The company’s leaders learned a few big lessons from their journey in Tennessee, including that, with enough research and data, they can find good communities in markets that aren’t necessarily huge urban centers.
They also reinforced their belief that senior living ownership success hinges on the strength of regional operators. And SLTC’s leaders came away with an even stronger belief that they must partner with operators that can work in alignment with them and share their goals.
At the center of the company’s model is Centered Care, through which operators gain access to a tech-enabled, integrated healthcare platform that uses data to help them grapple with the complexity and higher cost of cost resident care needs. The platform is agnostic in that residents don’t have to change insurance or primary care physicians to use it.
What SLTC discovered during its trial run in Brentwood was that data interoperability is more important than having a collection of disparate data sources that don’t “talk to” one another, so to speak.
“Interoperability amongst those technologies is what matters, because that gives us the leading indicator data points to know how to care for the residents at the right time, at the right place, and with the right care team,” Lydiard said.
Using that approach in Brentwood, SLTC and its operating partners notched higher length of stay along with fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations. In doing so, SLTC’s leaders believe they have proved their thesis that strong regional operators with the right tools can transform senior living operations for the better. And they have in the process created a model of operational reporting that they can use to demonstrate the value of senior living with other potential investors.
“Brentwood served as the testing ground and the sandbox for the Centered Care approach,” Lydiard told SHN. “When done right, Centered Care unlocks, on average, around $40,000 for an operator per building per year, and that’s significant.”
Poised for expansion
SLTC’s acquisition of The Villages of Windcrest is the first move in a likely series of acquisitions that the company’s leaders will announce this year.
At the outset, SLTC set out to “create an economic model that’s both efficient from a cost standpoint and from a revenue standpoint” which would accordingly “differentiate ourselves from anyone else out there in the investment space.”
In 2026, Whitman said the company is there and only poised to grow and improve from there. SLTC has its sights set on working with likeminded investors and operators that understand the power of the company’s model and seek to grow alongside it.
There are multiple companies that want to transact in senior living but don’t fully understand it. SLTC could offer them a way to deploy their dollars while leaning on the expertise of the company’s leaders, Whitman said.
Centered Care is another potential growth line separate from SLTC. The company in total now services 55 senior living communities with expectations to grow that number to more than 80 by this summer, Lydiard said.
Looking ahead, SLTC has another $300 million to $600 million in likely deals to execute this year, according to Small. The company transacts in a wide variety of arrangements for providing capital including general/limited partner common equity, debt, joint ventures and recapitalizations.
This year, the company’s leaders seek to expand the SLTC footprint by targeting portfolio investments of five communities and 500 units with typical equity investments of between $25 million and more than $100 million.
“The market is ready, the product is ready, the team is ready, and everything seems to be lining up as we’d hoped it would,” Whitman said.