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If you ask Treplus Communities CEO and Founder Jane Arthur Roslovic, she will tell you the active adult sector is on the cusp of its best years yet.
In 2026, the oldest baby boomers are turning 80, with millions more of them slated to reach the average age of senior housing residents in the years to come. Active adult is the first senior housing property type many boomers encounter, and it has much to offer them. The boomers are said to desire independence, wellness and an active lifestyle. Many boomers still work and want space for that. And the boomers are said to want all this at a cost that doesn’t break the bank.
Roslovic believes active adult can check all those boxes. NIC MAP data shows active adult monthly rent is on average lower than independent living and that the communities have a median age of about 10 years. Active adult demand is still relatively high, with average occupancy rates above 90% in major markets and a relatively low penetration rate compared to senior living.
For active adult pioneers like Treplus, the current moment is validation of a thesis first worked out more than a decade ago. Roslovic co-founded Treplus in 2014, and since then she has helped shape the product type and evolve it to what it is today inside of the company’s five communities in Ohio.
As Roslovic surveys the landscape for senior living, she sees a need for operators like Treplus to expand their offerings and help usher in active adult’s new era with more awareness and education. Treplus has grown over the years via new development, but unpredictable construction costs and other forces have prompted the company to pause those plans in the current era.
Instead of waiting for conditions to shift and for new projects to pencil out, Treplus is shifting to third-party managing active adult properties for select owners. To that end, the company and its leaders believe that the operator can both expand its footprint and help build a better future for the active adult sector.
“We’re in the ‘boutique phase,’ meaning we only want to take on clients that really understand active adult,” Roslovic told Senior Housing News during the recent 2026 Spring NIC Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
Treplus shifts to third-party management
Underpinning the company’s shift to third-party management is a belief that there are owners struggling with active adult lease-up in 2026. Oftentimes, these are multifamily companies that thought active adult was similar enough to apartments and jumped in feet-first, Roslovic said.
But the multifamily sales cycle is different than senior housing. For one, it’s longer, and less transactional. Salespeople must not only sell units, they also must sell a lifestyle to prospective residents. That is a message that sometimes gets lost in translation as new entrants from the multifamily world target senior housing.
“They’re used to getting 20 and 30 [monthly lease-ups]. Concessions are different than in active adult. Sometimes they say, ‘What do you mean I’m only going to get five, eight or maybe 11 leases a month?’” she added.
Treplus is offering to those sorts of owners a slate of services ranging from comprehensive property management and resident engagement to marketing, sales and leasing, financial planning and risk management.
The company is early in its management service line launch, and is seeking to work with owners of properties that may have acquired an asset and are now seeking to reposition and reinvigorate it. For example, Treplus is currently helping manage a struggling community in Northern Indiana regain its reputation. The operator is managing these communities and branding them in conjunction with the owners and not as Treplus properties.
“We’ll reposition with the owner and under the owner’s vision,” she said.
Treplus is targeting communities from the U.S. Midwest to the Southeast. The company’s leaders in the last 12 months hired Francine Bass to work as senior vice president of strategic growth, and she is partly focused on helping the operator enter new markets in the months and years ahead.
“It’s a challenge, but I think it’s an exciting challenge, because it’s going to set us up for lots of opportunities that are coming our way,” Roslovic said. “We also want to be careful that what we’re managing is successful.”
Active adult is ready to scale
While it’s an up-and-coming product type, the latest active adult data still shows that community counts and penetration rates fall short of senior living. That means the sector still has a lot of room to grow given where demand is today.
Roslovic believes that, if there was sufficient education regarding active adult, she and Treplus could build communities with units in the hundreds, not the dozens. She sees “plenty of ground” for new development in secondary and tertiary markets. But demand isn’t the problem for the active adult sector – awareness is.
She believes that the active adult sector faces similar conditions as the larger senior living industry did in the 1970s. Back then, consumers only knew about nursing homes. In the years and decades that followed, pioneers of the burgeoning independent living and assisted living sectors had to educate investors, owners and their customers about their products and services.
“And we’re at the same [moment], because we have so many people in the baby boomer cohort now that need an alternative to housing,” she said.
Roslovik sees a “disconnect” for many older adults who are in the midst of downsizing. Many older adults believe their options are either to move into a market-rate apartment building or an independent living community, when in reality neither is the right choice for them.
“They just don’t want a market rate apartment, and they really aren’t ready – mentally or emotionally – for independent living,” she said.
But active adult lies in a sweet spot with regard to services and rental rates. Not only are such communities geared toward a younger, more active group of older people, they also are typically cheaper than independent living by a good margin. That is a value proposition that appeals to the boomers, and even some younger Gen-Xers, Roslovic said.
She isn’t advocating for active adult to supplant another product type on the continuum, and Roslovic believes that there will always be a place for independent living, assisted living and memory care communities. But she thinks that active adult can and should have a larger spot on the care continuum – and she believes that it will one day.
“Now, we’re getting traction. We just need to accelerate,” she said.
The post Treplus Communities Is Ready for Active Adult’s Big Moment appeared first on Senior Housing News.
