Priority Life Care Promotes Coo To New President Role, Seeking Expansion, Evolution

Priority Life Care is bolstering its leadership structure in order to better support operations and prepare for growth in the coming years.

Bobby Petras, co-founder of the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based company, is shifting his responsibility from COO to the newly created role of president. The operator also backfilled Petras’ former leadership role by promoting Executive Vice President of Operations Dave Kloster to COO.

As president, Petras said he will focus on developing training and education programs, with the goal of Priority Life Care becoming an operator with “industry standard,” practices. That includes hospitality, and Priority Life Care seeks to match the caliber of services provided by hotel companies such as Ritz Carlton and Hilton. He also seeks to develop new best practices for information technology (IT) systems and other processes.

Petras noted that his transition to president will allow him to focus more on meeting with capital partners and focusing on company-wide initiatives as Priority Life Care looks to more growth ahead.

“We’ve really grown to a point … where you really can’t be the COO, run the day to day ops and run all the other stuff,” Petras said. “I’ve really been doing kind of a president’s job over the last year anyway.”

Priority Life Care also promoted Jenny Phillips to the role of vice president in conjunction with the leadership appointments. Moving forward, Petras said the leadership team will look to fill the vacant executive vice president position to continue to deepen its bench.

The timing comes as Priority Life Care is looking to continue growing its presence from the 65 communities that it currently operates. The company is surveying the deal market and seeking joint-venture opportunities, and already it has attracted new capital partners that will ramp up working with the operator ahead, Petras said.

The company’s recent accomplishments include scaling up with landlord Ventas (NYSE: VTR) and turning around a portfolio of communities to positive NOI when it had previously been in the negatives. Occupancy is also up by 7.1 percentage points through 2024, with a current average census of 81%. The company also saw same-store NOI growth of $13.2 million.

“Across the board, we’ve been really happy with some of the progress we’ve made,” Petras said. “

Now is the time to be investing in real estate and senior housing, given the demand ahead, Petras added.

“We’ve got 20 deals right now in our pipeline that I feel pretty confident will come on in 2025,” he said. “30% of them are joint venture deals where we’re putting some money into it.”

Priority Life Care also seeks to promote its senior housing support services, such its maintenance service line which manages senior living maintenance professionals, capital budgets and equipment. Priority Life Care’s umbrella of services also includes back-office services like accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable and human resources.

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