Nearly Half Of Senior Living Investors Expect More Moderate Rent Increases In 2025

Almost half of the senior living investors surveyed in a recent report from CBRE say they expect moderate increases to rental rates for senior living communities in 2025.

Among the investors and real estate professionals polled by CBRE for its second-half 2024 U.S. senior living report, 48% said they expect average rental rates between 3% and 7% for active adult, independent living, assisted living and memory care communities in the coming six months. That is a decrease from the company’s previous survey in the first half of 2024, in which 63% of respondents said they expected to see rental rate increases of 3% to 7% ahead.

At the same time, almost a quarter of the respondents, 20%, said they expected to see no change to senior living rental rates in the next six months. In the previous survey, almost no respondents said the same thing.

“Unlike our April survey with consensus expectations of a 3% rise in rental rates over the next 12 months, there was no clear consensus in our current survey,” the report’s authors wrote. “No respondents expected rent decreases for any asset class except skilled nursing.”

In 2024 senior living operators have taken a more cautious approach to resident rate increases with a belief that they must “be careful” about acting larger rate increases as they have done in the past few years.

No respondents said they expect to see rent growth above 7% in that time frame, and about 25% of respondents said they don’t expect to see any active adult rent growth in the next six months.

A little more than half of respondents to the CBRE survey, 54%, said they saw no change to senior living cap rates in the last six months. On average, senior living cap rates fell just 8 basis points in that time frame.

Average cap rates for active adult communities decreased by 11 basis points between March and October, “nearly offsetting the increase recorded during the prior survey,” the report’s authors wrote.

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