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In 2026, the oldest baby boomers turn 80. It’s an important time for the senior living industry, but not an easy one.
With the arrival of the oldest baby boomers, the industry steps onto a years-long demand runway that will see millions more older adults reach the average age of senior living. That alone means that the senior living industry has a good chance to substantially fill every unit in the years to come, but the bigger challenge ahead is actually growing to meet that demand. It also means new residents with new wants and needs.
The changing face of technology and data means that senior living companies have new ways to reach and serve their customers, including through “answer engines” like ChatGPT and in Google’s search results overview. It also means that their customers are doing more research than ever before, and coming away with particular views of what they want their next chapters in life to be.
As external growth remains tough, operators are subsisting on acquiring turnarounds and other opportunities, often with larger capital partners. But doing so requires an even keener focus on operations than ever before.
What operators do in response to these and other trends in 2026 may well define the years that follow.
A new era for senior living marketing begins
Senior living prospects are doing research in a way they simply weren’t a few years ago, and that trend will help reshape senior living sales and marketing in the year to come.
Not long ago, senior living operators built websites meant for search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings in search engines. But the rise of “answer engines” like ChatGPT is upending this model.
Instead of searching for keywords as they did before, prospects are now asking questions and getting written “answers” back. In the past, a search for “when does someone need assisted living?” might have turned up a list of senior living website FAQs. If a user wanted to read the answer to that question, they had to visit a website to see it.
That is no longer true. Data suggests that users encountering AI-powered tools like Google’s “answers overview” aren’t clicking on search results the way they used to. In fact, a Pew Research survey of 900 U.S.-based adults found that users who see an AI summary during an online search “are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one.” The Pew data also showed that Google users were more likely to end their browsing session after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.
All of this means that operators, even those adept at using tried-and-true marketing tactics, will struggle if they do not pivot for the AI age.
The good news is that efforts to boost SEO also count for AIO, albeit in a different way. Since Google and ChatGPT pull from the internet, FAQs and other web info are still important. And the fact has not changed that sales decisions don’t occur until a resident has actually toured a community. And while AIO is a new challenge for operators, it’s also a new opportunity for them to attract a new group of customers in a new way.
Solo agers become powerful force reshaping senior living
Divorces later in life, longer lifespans and fewer adult children are factors giving rise to an expanding group of residents: the solo agers. Their wants and needs will be a driving force reshaping the senior living industry in the years to come.
The most recent U.S. Census data shows that half of all adults age 70 and older are living alone. A November AARP survey cited experts on aging from Harvard University, who predict that the majority of people age 80 and older by 2038 will be solo agers.
Used to relying on themselves and not a family caregiver, solo agers are generally healthier, have fewer cognitive challenges and are more socially connected with peers, Dr. Sachin J. Shah, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told AARP. Some are still enjoying the finer things in life – such as 102-year-old Mildred Kirschenbaum, who told the magazine she still plays mahjong and drinks “medicinal” vodka tonics.
But the flip side is that they have less support when things do go wrong. In its survey, AARP found that solo agers most enjoy freedom and autonomy, and consider loneliness to be the worst thing about aging alone. With a wide choice of amenities, activities and spaces to mingle with others, senior living communities are settings where such older adults can thrive. And indeed, senior living companies have an outsized opportunity to attract solo agers, especially with out-of-the-box models and creativity.
With no spouse or pension and fewer children, solo agers of the near-future may struggle to afford the growing cost of senior living services. In fact, 63% of older adults living under the poverty line were solo agers, according to U.S. Census data cited by AARP.
The bottom line is that the rise of the solo agers may well mean residents who want to sip scotch and smoke a cigar well into their advanced years but struggle to afford that quality of life. The challenge for senior living operators will be marketing to them effectively, drawing them to the senior living community while still respecting their values of autonomy and self-reliance, and then offering them an appealing experience in a way that doesn’t blow up their monthly rates.
Development/demand divide brings crisis closer
The senior living industry’s ongoing “investment gap” is widening, and in 2026, that gap will grow ever-closer to crisis levels.
Recent NIC MAP data showed that the senior living industry would have to develop new communities at twice its maximum historical pace each year for the next 20 just to maintain 90% occupancy levels given where demand is today. More than that, the number of senior living units is actually contracting in markets where owners are converting communities to other uses or closing them at a rate higher than new communities open.
The immediate effect of these trends will be that substantially every senior living community fills up or nears full occupancy. But full occupancy is not a good thing if growth challenges mean operators are leaving money on the table while older adults struggle to access needed care and services.
With each passing year, the senior living industry draws closer to a “crisis” where millions of older adults want and need senior living services but are unable to obtain them.
“There’s going to be an inflection point and I think development is going to have to be part of the solution,” Confluent Senior Living Managing Director Matt Derrick said during a panel at this year’s NIC Spring Conference. “If we do not meet the demand, our industry is going to suffer.”
The issue is not as simple as just kickstarting new projects. Those projects need financing from equity investors that, at least as of the end of 2025, were still cautious about new development given the uncertainty in the market today. And even if they do get projects in the ground this year, the average time to completion is currently more than two years, according to NIC data.
The result is that the senior living industry will struggle to grow precisely when it should be growing.
The industry could still catch up. According to data from NIC Senior Principal Omar Zahraoui, when new senior living supply dipped to about 1% of total inventory – just as it has today – that preceded an industrywide real estate growth cycle within five years.
Still, for now, the senior living industry is behind the growth curve with few immediate signs that will change in 2026. And with each passing year operators risk having their communities disrupted by the very customers they couldn’t expand for.
Senior living SWAT teams become standard protocol
Brookdale Senior Living, Sonida Senior Living, Watermark Retirement Communities – these companies have standardized an approach to operations and turnarounds that will become more common in the year to come and beyond.
All three operators deployed rapid response teams – also called SWAT teams – at struggling communities with the goal of improving results. In a nutshell, the approach helped them improve occupancy and financial performance. Those results will push other operators to take similar strategies in 2026.
As development remains tough, many operators are taking on new communities for owners with specific goals. Although this is a good way to springboard to new growth, some of these properties have changed hands specifically because their previous operators couldn’t generate the right financial metrics.
In 2025, REITs including Ventas (NYSE: VTR) and Welltower (NYSE: WELL) have sought to help their partners grow occupancy within specific parts of their operating portfolios in need of improvement. As these companies seek to buy more of the available senior living assets on the market in the coming year, it’s natural that they will seek operating partners that have a reliable and tested approach turnarounds. And while there have always been turnaround specialists in the industry, signs point to a rapid-response team approach becoming ubiquitous.
Affordability becomes industry’s hottest buzzword
Move over, middle market. Affordability is the new buzzword in town, with consequential implications for senior living.
Affordability was the “buzziest political word of the year,” as Rachel Cohen Booth wrote for Vox. Zohran Mamdani wielded the term to electoral victory in New York City’s mayoral race, Abigail Spanberger did much the same in Virginia’s governor race, and Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said affordability is “the central reason to be a Democrat.” Meanwhile, President Trump referred to affordability as a “hoax” but also said he has “no higher priority than making America affordable again.”
Affordability has become a pressing issue as rising prices have taken a toll on the public – particularly people outside of the top income brackets, as wealth continues to be concentrated at the top. Half the world’s population owns only 1% of its wealth, economist Joseph Stiglitz noted in a November interview. In the United States, 64% of registered voters described the cost of living as a very serious problem in a December 2025 Quinnipiac University poll. Health care and housing were the two areas of spending that led the pack in terms of being “very difficult to afford.” About 20% of respondents identified health care as “very difficult” to afford, and 13% said the same about housing.
Given that senior living is a product that is a combination of health care and housing, these survey findings reflect how pertinent the affordability debate is to the sector.
One element of this debate has been about how to address the affordability pressures that come from “life-cycle mismatch,” as described in the Vox article. This mismatch stems from the fact that significant expenses tend to hit when people’s earnings are not at their peak; costs for childcare tend to come early in people’s careers while health care expenses are at their highest when people are retired.
Mamdani took on this problem head-on, making free child care a central pillar of his campaign. With the midterms this year, expect more candidates to offer policies that take on not only the child care issue but the lack of affordable housing and care for older adults, as Kamala Harris did in her presidential campaign when she proposed making non-medical home care a Medicare benefit.
Of course, Mamdani still must execute on his promises, and the Federal government shutdown over the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies underscores the difficulty of any policy action around health care on Capitol Hill. Still, the sharp focus on affordability makes this an important moment for senior living advocates to push for policies that could be favorable for the industry and for consumers.
For years, the senior living industry has sought to bring the cost of services down to a level where middle-income older adults can afford them. In the past, that was defined as a monthly rate between about $2,000 and $4,000, which many operators would tell you is all but impossible to achieve, especially as someone needs more care. The inflation of the last several years has only compounded the challenges.
Exhibit A might be Blackstone’s senior living portfolio sell-off at a loss of more than $600 million. One issue is that these properties tended to charge rates in a more middle-market range, and these communities have not bounced back from pandemic-era hits as robustly as higher-end offerings.
“The value of communities targeting the middle market, which charge $3,500 to $6,000 a month, that made up most of the Blackstone senior-housing portfolio is lagging behind,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Middle-income residents have a much harder time affording the price hikes needed to cover surging labor costs and inflation.”
While multiple operators have had success setting truly middle-market rates, doing so often requires a good initial cost basis, low labor costs and public support. Faced with a challenge to build middle-market options at scale, more operators are instead promoting the affordability of their services in terms of the overall value for each dollar spent.
Put another way, an operator could not in good faith call a $7,000 monthly rent for assisted living a “middle-market” rate. But they could show the financial math that makes such a rate a good value relative to other similar services.
While this might be effective marketing, it does not solve the affordability dilemma facing the industry. Some industry thought leaders have proposed that more robust public-private partnerships are essential to ever cracking the code middle-market senior living. The road is steep – especially as Congress and the Trump administration in 2025 slashed certain public health care funding – but with affordability at the center of the political calculus in the midterms, 2026 will be a key moment for the industry to step up and help shape the agenda. Doing so could pave the way for public-private collaborations to create not just a “good value for the money” senior living product but a truly scalable middle market offering.
Personalization spells the end of traditional care levels
Senior living operators have more data and tech platforms powering their operations than ever before. At the same time, they are plugging into new payment sources through value-based care. The convergence of these trends is helping senior living operators create a new kind of care plan, one that is personalized and unique to nearly every resident’s preferences and health.
In 2025, senior living operators set their services apart by making care more granular for their residents. Not long ago, each rung on the senior living care continuum was separate, with residents living in different wings of a community and sometimes not even sharing amenities.
Most operators these days could tell you that senior living residents don’t often fit neatly into one box or another, leading to more blended care levels that mix and match services as needed.
The senior living community of tomorrow may well be one without any strictly-defined care levels. Residents won’t live in an independent living or assisted living unit, they’ll live in an “apartment” or a “cottage.” Although these may well function like the senior living units of old, operators will increasingly not define residents by their abilities, and instead group them based on their interests and other information that operators glean during the move-in process.
This is already close to reality for companies like Trilogy Health Services, which believes that residents see communities not as a clinical facility with different wings, like a hospital, but a living community where people of all walks of life share the same space and get the services that they need. And that is what the boomers themselves say they want.
The waitlist becomes a revenue driver
As demand for senior living grows and development remains relatively frozen, many senior living operators will find their communities full and waitlists growing in the years to come. As senior living operators well know, a growing waitlist is not always a good thing.
Some in-demand communities carry waitlists with average times from inquiry to move-in measured in decades, at least on paper. But the boomers don’t have years to sit idly and wait for a unit to open up, and many will need and want senior living operators to help manage their complicated chronic conditions whether those operators have room for them or not.
The realities of development and construction mean that senior living operators will likely not have much room to grow anew in the immediate future. These pressures are why senior living operators are exploring ways to monetize their waitlists. For example, Portland, Oregon-based RoseVilla in 2024 launched TakeRoot, a program that “replaces passive waiting with real-time engagement.”
The program offers three tiers under which residents can make a deposit toward their future stay, in amounts of$3,000, $6,000 or as much as $90,000. For that price, older adults get services ranging from information and planning resources on the low end to full access to RoseVilla’s 22-acre campus and wellbeing programming and coaching at the high end.
Growth difficulties, the need to shore up revenue and the need to plant their flag for a choosy future customer are all reasons that other operators will look to monetize their waitlists in a similar way. As with anything in senior living operations, providers’ challenge is how to offer customers something they feel is a fair value for the cost. To that end, operators going this route can’t just sell information or access to amenities and call it a day, they must make residents feel like they are preparing for a happier, healthier future while also immediately experiencing upside aligned with their goals, which may revolve around health, wellness, social connections, a sense of financial security and beyond.
M&A speeds up, REIT partners stand to gain
Smaller deals helped push senior living dealmaking to record levels in 2025 as real estate representing billions of dollars changed hands. Conditions that led to a number of new opportunities to buy in 2025 will only accelerate in 2026 as buyers and sellers come closer together and the Fed potentially cuts interest rates even further from where they are today.
Big portfolios stand to change hands as in the past, but recent history says more of those communities will end up under the purview of potentially different operators as their new owners split them into more bite-sized pieces.
Senior living REITs like Ventas and Welltower have taken advantage of current conditions by picking off parts of portfolios or even single communities at a time, and then reorganizing them into regional portfolios with existing operating partners.
According to a fall senior housing outlook from Walker & Dunlop, cap rate compression, a general need to rebalance and prune portfolios, management of debt maturities, a lack of new development and shifts to Medicaid helped push sellers to make more deals in 2025. A recent survey from BBG Real Estate Services shows investors expect more cap rate compression ahead as operators grow rent and revenue.
Those conditions will incentivize big buyers to acquire what they want – importantly, leaving behind what they don’t – to assemble their growing senior housing operating portfolios. Operators that already work with REITs will have plenty of potential work to take on in 2026 as this trend evolves. The flip side is that, as REITs snatch up value-add opportunities, that will mean fewer such management arrangements for companies that don’t already work with them. That isn’t to say those opportunities will vanish, but they may become fewer and farther between.
