Senior Living Feasibility Studies: The Move-In Treadmill and the Cohort That Actually Buys

In multifamily, a good operator suppresses turnover. Renewals are a management lever, and a community that keeps its residents spends less to fill its units.

Above independent living, that lever does not exist. Every resident eventually leaves, and they leave for reasons no operator controls: death, hospitalisation, or progression to a level of care the community cannot provide. Retention is not a skill in this sector. It is a clinical outcome.

Which produces a structural fact that most feasibility studies model as though it were temporary. A stabilised assisted living community must replace more than half its residents every year, forever. The sales and marketing function is not a lease-up cost that ends at stabilisation. It is permanent operating infrastructure, and the annual cost of simply standing still is large enough to change a coverage ratio.

That is the first of three findings this article is built on. The second is that the demographic argument the sector has been making for fifteen years has been built on the wrong cohort, and the right one is only arriving now. The third is that the affordability screen most market studies use tests the wrong thing entirely.

This article sets out the feasibility half of a senior living assignment. Who the customer actually is and where the trade area sits. How to screen demand on assets rather than income. How the move-in requirement is computed and what it costs. Why the lease-up carry differs by segment more than the building does. And how the credit routes, which in this asset class runs through a federal programme that appears nowhere else in commercial real estate.

It then carries the appraisal analysis as the supporting half.

What the study has to prove

That the demand pool is real at the price point. Not that seniors exist, but that households in the trade area can fund the expected residency from what they actually have.

That the community can fill and keep filling. The lease-up number and the permanent replacement number are different, and both need answering.

That the lease-up can be carried. At assisted living absorption rates, the carry is measured in years and it consumes a large share of the equity.

That labour is priced at what the local market will actually supply, which is the sector's dominant cost and its principal margin risk.

Finding one: there are no renewals

Length of stay is the variable that drives everything here. Assisted living median residency runs somewhere around twenty-two months, memory care shorter, independent living considerably longer. ``

If residents stay a median of twenty-two months, a full hundred-unit community turns over roughly 55 units a year. Not once during lease-up. Every year.

*Illustrative. Placement agencies have historically charged a fee equal to roughly one month's rent per completed move-in.* ``

On revenue of roughly $5.7 million, that is about three and a half per cent of the top line spent purely on replacing residents who left, in a year where occupancy did not move at all.

Compare the multifamily analogue and the difference becomes clear. Apartments turn over at a broadly similar rate, but roughly half of those departures can be converted to renewals by a competent manager. Here none can. A resident who is happy, well cared for and would like to stay another five years still leaves when their health changes, and the operator's excellence is what made them stay long enough for their health to change.

Three consequences for a feasibility model:

The marketing line does not step down at stabilisation. A pro forma showing elevated sales and marketing during lease-up and a lower steady state has misunderstood the business. The steady state is the lease-up, permanently.

Length of stay is a revenue variable, not a footnote. If median stay shortens by three months, the annual move-in requirement rises by roughly nine on a hundred units, and the acquisition cost rises with it. Residents are entering later and sicker across the sector, which pushes in that direction. ``

Occupancy should be expressed as a move-in quota. Holding 88 units occupied at a twenty-two month median stay requires 48 move-ins a year. That is a number a sales director can be held to. A coverage ratio is not.

Finding two: the demand cohort is 80 plus, not 65 plus

Almost every senior housing pitch deck argues from the 65 and over population. For everything above independent living, that is the wrong cohort, and the error has a fifteen-year history.

Assisted living move-in ages cluster in the mid-eighties. Memory care is similar or later. So the population that actually buys the product is the 80 plus and 85 plus cohort, not the 65 plus one. ``

Now put that against the arithmetic of the baby boom:

The 65 plus population has been growing since 2011. The 80 plus population has not, because the same people had not yet reached 80. The sector has spent fifteen years telling a demographic story using a cohort that does not buy the product, and the inflection that actually matters is only beginning now. ``

Two implications, pointing in opposite directions, and both worth saying.

Discount any study anchored on 65 plus growth. If the demand model in front of you counts people aged 65 and over in the trade area, it is counting a population that will mostly not move into an assisted living community for another fifteen years. Require it rebuilt on 80 plus for assisted living and 85 plus for memory care.

And take the inflection seriously rather than as boilerplate. The demographic tailwind everyone has been asserting since 2011 is arriving now for the first time in the segments where most development capital goes. A project delivering into 2028 or 2029 meets a genuinely expanding cohort, which is not something the last fifteen years of assisted living development could say.

Finding three: screen on assets, not income

Private pay assisted living and memory care are funded from assets, not from income. Home equity, savings, and the proceeds of selling the family home, spent down across a residency that has a median of under two years.

Most market studies screen the demand pool on household income. That test is wrong in a way that is easy to demonstrate:

*Illustrative.*

The income screen excludes both households. Both are comfortably able to fund the expected residency. And notice that the household which looks stronger on income is the weaker of the two on durability, which is precisely the reverse of what an income screen implies.

The deeper problem is that almost nobody has retirement income equal to the cost of assisted living. A screen set at the full cost excludes essentially the entire market and produces a study nobody believes. A screen set at some fraction of cost produces a number with no analytical meaning. Neither is a demand model.

The correct screen is asset-based: what share of 80 plus households in the trade area hold sufficient liquid assets and home equity to fund the expected residency at the proposed rate, net of their income. That requires home ownership rates, home values and asset distributions by age band rather than income tables, and it produces a smaller and far more defensible pool.

The affordability gap is real and it is well documented. Research on the middle market has established that a large share of the 75 plus population cannot afford private pay senior housing at prevailing rates even after applying home equity. ``

For a feasibility study the middle market finding cuts both ways. It shrinks the addressable pool at the proposed rate, which is a constraint. It also identifies a segment that is genuinely underserved, which is an opportunity for a product designed to a lower price point rather than for another market-rate community chasing the same thin top slice.

Market and demand analysis

The trade area is drawn around the family, not only the resident

The resident is frequently not the decision maker. For assisted living and especially memory care, the search, the tours and often part of the payment are driven by an adult child, typically in their fifties or sixties and frequently living somewhere other than the parent's home town.

The consequence is that families relocate the parent to be near the caring child. So a trade area drawn mechanically around the site, counting seniors within a radius, may be measuring the wrong population. A meaningful share of move-ins originate outside it, brought in by a child who lives inside it. ``

The practical instruction: build the trade area on both, and validate it against where existing residents in the competitive set actually came from. Competitors will often share that, and it is far better evidence than any ring.

Trade area conventions by segment should also be stated rather than assumed, since independent living, assisted living and memory care draw differently, with higher acuity generally drawing wider because the need is more urgent and the alternatives fewer.

The demand build

Trade area households headed by someone 80 plus, screened on assets as above, times a penetration rate, adjusted for the competitive set's capture.

Then subtract what the existing supply already serves, and add the pipeline. The sector's benchmark dataset is the quarterly occupancy, absorption, inventory, construction and rent series published for primary and secondary markets, which is where competitive supply and forward construction should be taken from rather than from a general commercial database. ``

One thing worth checking specifically: is another community opening in the same primary market area during the subject's lease-up? Because the move-in flow is finite and slow, two communities filling simultaneously do not each fill at the market rate. They split it, and both take longer than either modelled.

The revenue build

From unit mix and acuity mix

Build from the unit mix by type and the acuity mix by level of care, never from a blended monthly rate.

Room and board by unit type, meaning studio, one bedroom, two bedroom and shared, then care revenue layered on by level, whether the operator uses point-based acuity scoring or discrete tiers. Add second person fees where couples share a unit, and community or move-in fees, treated according to whether they are earned on arrival or amortised. ``

Rate growth should be modelled separately for the two streams. Recent conditions have seen rent increases stabilising above 4% annually, with most market participants anticipating 1% to 5% increases, though expectations for rate growth are weaker in the care components than in the housing components. That divergence matters, because it is the care component that carries the labour cost.

The ageing in place question

As a resident ages in place, acuity rises. Care revenue rises with it. So does staffing cost.

Whether that is accretive depends entirely on whether care pricing keeps pace with care cost, and there is reason to think it often does not: care tiers are typically repriced annually while wage inflation and acuity creep run continuously. On that reading, the margin on a long-tenured high-acuity resident can be thinner than on a fresh low-acuity move-in, which would mean the community's margin depends on its move-in flow in a second and less obvious way.

I would present this as a hypothesis rather than a finding, because it requires operator-level data on care price against care cost to establish. `` But a feasibility study should at minimum model care revenue and care staffing cost as linked rather than independent, and test what happens if the link is unfavourable.

Lease-up, and why the carry differs by segment more than the building does

The absorption difference between segments is the sector's best known operating fact and its consequence for the carry is where feasibility work actually happens.

Take a 90-unit community. At assisted living absorption it fills in roughly thirty months. At independent living absorption, the same 90 units fill in roughly fifteen.

*Illustrative.*

Same building, same cost, same equity. The carry differs by nearly $2.8 million because the residents arrive at a different rate, and the reason they arrive at a different rate is clinical rather than commercial: higher acuity move-ins are triggered by a health event, and health events arrive on their own schedule.

Two structuring consequences. The operating deficit escrow and interest reserve must span the full segment-appropriate lease-up, not a multifamily-style twelve to eighteen months. And a sponsor moving from multifamily into assisted living, which is a common and reasonable move, is the sponsor most likely to size the reserve on instinct and run out at month twenty-two with the building two thirds full.

Cost structure: labour is the model

Labour runs around sixty per cent of revenue in assisted living and higher in memory care. `` Nothing else in the cost structure is close, and every other decision in the model is downstream of it.

Staffing ratios are partly regulated rather than chosen. A number of states mandate minimum staffing for assisted living and memory care, and where they do, the ratio is a floor the operator cannot manage below regardless of census or acuity. The regulations vary substantially between jurisdictions and they change. ``

Agency and contract labour is the sector's defining margin risk. Contract staff carry a substantial premium over employed staff, usage spiked after 2020 and has since fallen back without returning to prior levels. `` A model built on employed-staff wages with no agency line has assumed a labour market that may not exist in the subject's location, and the correct sensitivity is not a percentage on wages but a share of hours filled by agency at the agency rate.

Caregiver turnover is high and carries real recruitment and training cost, which should be an explicit line rather than absorbed into wages.

Liability and professional insurance is a step change rather than an inflation line in a handful of litigation-heavy states, where elder care claim frequency and severity have repriced coverage materially. `` This is a market-specific cost and it should never be carried at a national average.

Food and dining cost per resident day, utilities for a licensed building, a market management fee whether or not the current owner charges one, and regulatory and compliance cost including survey preparation and remediation.

Replacement reserves

Senior living carries substantial furniture, equipment and building systems, and communities compete on physical presentation, so a tired common area is a revenue problem as well as a capital one.

``

Note the first line, because it is specific to this asset class: resident room refurbishment scales with the move-in rate rather than with time. A community turning 55 units a year is refurbishing 55 units a year. That links the reserve directly to the length of stay finding above, and it is another reason a shortening residency costs more than it appears to.

Coverage and sensitivity

The definitions

Conventional and SBA practice tests EBITDA over total debt service. Senior housing lenders generally require more than the SBA floor, and the federal programme discussed below has historically required around 1.45 times. ``

Under USDA's rule at 7 CFR Part 5001, replacement capital expenditure is deducted from EBITDA before the ratio is taken.

*Illustrative.*

``

Sensitivities that mean something

Lease-up running six months long at assisted living absorption, tested against the escrow rather than against stabilised revenue.

Length of stay shortening by three months, which raises the annual move-in requirement, the acquisition cost and the room refurbishment reserve simultaneously. This is the single most under-tested variable in the sector.

Agency labour at twenty per cent of hours, rather than a percentage uplift on the wage line.

Liability insurance repricing at renewal in an exposed state.

A competitor opening in the primary market area during lease-up, splitting a finite move-in flow.

The demand pool rebuilt on an asset screen, if the study used income. That is not a sensitivity so much as a correction, and if the deal only works on the income-screened pool it does not work.

Break-even, stated as a sales quota

The most useful single output: the community covers at 1.00 times with 71 of its 100 units occupied, and at 1.45 times with 86.

Then convert it. Holding 86 units occupied at a twenty-two month median stay requires 47 move-ins a year, every year. That is the number the sales function has to deliver in perpetuity for the credit to perform, and it is a far more actionable statement of the covenant than the ratio it came from.

Programme routing

This asset class routes differently from everything else in this series, because it has a dedicated federal programme.

HUD FHA Section 232 is the government backbone for licensed residential care, covering assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing and board and care. Two branches matter: Section 232 for new construction and substantial rehabilitation, and Section 232/223(f) for the purchase or refinance of an existing facility.

The programme's requirements are what make it distinctive: the facility must be licensed, so the licence is a condition precedent rather than a diligence item; there is a required replacement reserve and, on new construction, an operating deficit escrow; professional liability insurance is mandated; and the coverage and leverage tests are set by the programme rather than negotiated. Independent living on its own is generally not eligible, and IL units are permitted only as a component alongside licensed care, which is a live constraint for a mixed community. ``

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seniors housing products cover independent living, assisted living and memory care, with standalone skilled nursing generally excluded or tightly capped as a share of a property or portfolio. Both require a demonstrated seniors housing operator, which is a real constraint on a first-time sponsor regardless of the strength of the real estate. ``

SBA 7(a) and 504 are available, and the reason is worth stating because it connects to a distinction that runs through this whole series: care is an active operating business, so the passive real estate exclusion that keeps manufactured housing communities out of SBA does not apply here. Assisted living sits on the special purpose property list, which raises the equity injection. ``

USDA offers two routes and they are not the same test. Business and Industry under 7 CFR Part 5001 applies to a private borrower in a rural area, with the stricter coverage definition above. Community Facilities applies where the borrower is a public body, non-profit or tribe, and whether an assisted living facility qualifies as an essential community facility requires checking, as does the split between the Direct and Guaranteed programmes, which are governed separately and carry different rural thresholds. ``

Conventional, bridge and construction lending for a sponsor or asset that fits none of the above, sized as discussed to the full segment-appropriate lease-up.

When a third-party feasibility study is required

Start-up and new construction, change of use or repositioning, a material change in the acuity mix the licence permits, projections unsupported by historical operations, and the lender's or programme's own requirement. Independence is the operative test throughout.

Where senior living projects fail

The lease-up ran at assisted living absorption while the escrow was sized for multifamily absorption. The most common failure, and the one that catches sponsors crossing over from other asset classes.

The demand pool was screened on income, so the affordable private pay market proved smaller than modelled.

The demographic case was built on the 65 plus cohort, which does not buy the product.

Labour cost and agency usage destroyed the modelled margin.

The licence transfer was delayed on acquisition, stranding cash flow while the change of ownership survey ran.

Staffing ratio regulation changed mid-hold, raising the cost floor.

Liability insurance repriced in an exposed state.

Length of stay shortened, raising the move-in requirement, the acquisition cost and the refurbishment reserve at once, with nothing appearing to have gone wrong.

A competitor opened in the same primary market area during lease-up, and both communities filled slowly.

The sales function was modelled as a lease-up cost rather than as permanent infrastructure, so the marketing budget stepped down at exactly the point the treadmill started.

What the appraisal will test

The feasibility study establishes whether the community can fill and hold. The appraisal establishes what it is worth, and the first question is which asset class it is even in.

Not one asset class

Senior housing is routinely discussed as a single property type. For valuation purposes it is not.

The sector spans at least seven distinct operating models, being active adult, independent living, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, continuing care retirement communities, and the emerging middle-market segment, and they differ from one another more than office differs from retail.

The organising variable is acuity: how much care the resident requires. Everything else follows from it.

Active adult and independent living sit at the real estate end. Residents are largely independent, the offering is housing plus amenities and optional services, and the economics resemble multifamily with a higher service load. Independent living typically houses residents aged 62 and over who are physically and mentally healthy, on roughly annual leases at monthly rates commonly ranging from about $1,500 to above $5,000.

Assisted living introduces care. Residents undergo physical and mental evaluation, and the community assists with activities of daily living. Assisted living communities generally charge two things: room and board, and care, and those are different revenue streams with different characteristics.

Memory care serves residents who can no longer care for themselves. It is state regulated with no federal regulatory framework, requires more caregiver training, higher staffing ratios, and commonly runs $4,000 to $8,000 per month.

Skilled nursing is a healthcare business. It is federally reimbursed and heavily regulated, and its economics are driven by reimbursement rates, case mix and regulatory compliance rather than by rent.

The regulatory dividing line runs between skilled nursing and everything below it.

Acuity drives risk drives capitalisation rate

The relationship is direct and observable in the market: active adult carries the lowest capitalisation rates and skilled nursing the highest, in direct correlation with the operational and litigation risk that higher acuity brings.

Recent survey indications for primary markets illustrate the pattern. Active adult runs approximately 5.32% for Class A properties to 6.71% for Class C. Independent living runs approximately 5.97% for Class A to 7.52% for Class C. Both segments show a spread of roughly 67 to 71 basis points between Class A and Class B alone, which is a substantial premium for asset quality within a single segment.

Higher-acuity segments price wider, and the reason is not merely that care operations are harder to run. They carry litigation exposure, regulatory enforcement risk, staffing dependency and reimbursement risk that a rental housing asset does not.

The 2026 direction has been toward compression. Investor surveys have shown three-quarters or more expecting cap rates to fall, with one survey finding none expecting an increase over the coming year, and measured declines of roughly 17 to 19 basis points over recent six-month periods. Occupancy has climbed toward 90%, demand has been outpacing new supply by a wide margin, and operating margins across senior housing operating portfolios surpassed 25% in mid-2025, the highest since 2018.

The sector's standing with institutional capital has shifted accordingly: a major annual industry outlook ranked senior housing second among twenty-seven property subsectors for both investment and development prospects, behind only data centres, having placed it mid-pack as recently as 2023.

Two revenue streams, two characters

For any community above independent living, revenue divides into two components that behave differently and should be modelled separately.

Room and board is the housing component, a monthly rate for the unit and basic services. This behaves like rent: recurring, predictable, tied to occupancy and unit type.

Care revenue is charged by level of care, tiered by acuity, and adjusted as a resident's needs change. This behaves like service revenue: tied to acuity mix rather than occupancy, staffing-intensive, and margin-sensitive to labour cost.

Two communities with identical occupancy can produce materially different revenue if one carries a higher acuity mix than the other. The appraisal requirement is to model acuity mix explicitly, with care revenue derived from level-of-care distribution rather than applied as a percentage of total revenue. A projection that models a single blended monthly rate has collapsed the two streams and lost the analysis.

The category error

There are two valuation frameworks in this sector and they answer different questions. A capitalisation rate applied to net operating income is appropriate for stabilised, owned real estate. An operating EBITDA multiple is appropriate for a management company or an operator-only transaction where no real estate transfers.

Blending the two is a category error. A valuation that applies an EBITDA multiple to a fee-simple community, or a cap rate to a management contract, has answered the wrong question. This matters because senior living transactions are frequently structured in ways that separate the real estate from the operation, including sale-leasebacks, RIDEA structures and operator transitions with the property retained. The first analytical step is establishing what interest is actually being valued.

The licence

Every community above independent living operates under a licence, and the licence is both an asset and a constraint.

Licensed bed or unit count is the capacity limit: a community cannot serve more residents at a given acuity than its licence permits, regardless of physical capacity. Licences are not automatically transferable, and change of ownership typically requires regulatory approval, with the process, timeline and conditions varying by state. Compliance history affects value, since survey deficiencies, enforcement actions, admission holds and public ratings all bear on both operating performance and marketability.

For skilled nursing specifically, the certificate of need regime in states that maintain one is a significant value driver: where new beds cannot be licensed, existing licensed beds carry scarcity value independent of the building housing them.

Absorption, and going-concern allocation

For lease-up and prospective value work, absorption assumptions must be segment-specific. Recent survey work indicates most participants expect monthly absorption of roughly three to eight units for active adult, independent living and continuing care communities, but only zero to four units for assisted living and memory care.

That is a substantial difference and it flows directly into a lease-up model. A 90-unit assisted living community absorbing at three units a month takes two and a half years to fill; an independent living community of the same size at six units a month takes fifteen months. The carrying cost difference across that interval is significant, and it is the single most important input in a prospective value opinion for a new community.

Where the assignment requires a going-concern allocation, value must be split across real property, FF&E including the commercial kitchen, medical equipment, life safety and nurse call systems and vehicles, and intangibles including the licence where separately valuable, the assembled workforce, resident relationships and referral networks.

The principle from special-purpose valuation applies with force: business revenues determine the sustainable rent, and sustainable rent determines the real property value. A senior living building is worth what a competent operator could pay to occupy it, not what the current operator's particular performance implies. In a sector where operational performance varies widely between operators running identical physical assets, that distinction is not academic.

Where senior living appraisals go wrong

• Segment misidentified, applying independent living metrics to an assisted living community or the reverse.
• Room and board and care revenue blended, which loses the acuity analysis entirely.
• Acuity mix not modelled, so revenue growth assumptions have no basis.
• Absorption borrowed from the wrong segment.
• Labour cost understated, or modelled at current wages with no growth.
• Licence transferability not addressed.
• Cap rate applied without reference to acuity.
• EBITDA multiple and cap rate frameworks blended on a fee-simple asset.
• Compliance history omitted.

What a lender is reading for

On the feasibility side

• Is the demand cohort 80 plus for assisted living and 85 plus for memory care, rather than 65 plus?
• Is the demand pool screened on assets and home equity rather than on income?
• Is the trade area drawn around the adult child decision maker as well as the resident?
• Is the annual move-in requirement computed from length of stay, and is its acquisition cost carried as a permanent line rather than a lease-up cost?
• Does the marketing budget hold at stabilisation rather than stepping down?
• Is the lease-up carry sized to segment-appropriate absorption, and tested against a six-month overrun?
• Is agency labour modelled as a share of hours at the agency rate?
• Is the replacement reserve linked to the move-in rate for resident room refurbishment?
• Is coverage tested under the definition the programme applies?
• Is break-even stated as occupied units and as an annual move-in quota?

On the appraisal side

• Which segment is this, precisely, and do the metrics applied match it?
• How is revenue split between room and board and care, and is the acuity mix modelled?
• What is the licensed capacity, and is the licence transferable?
• Is the absorption assumption segment-appropriate?
• Is labour modelled realistically, with wage growth and local market supply addressed?
• Does the capitalisation rate reflect the acuity risk rather than a sector-wide average?
• Would the real property support its assigned value under a different operator?

Senior living is currently among the most sought-after property sectors in commercial real estate, with demographics and constrained supply supporting fundamentals across every scenario a market participant might model. That does not make individual communities easy to value. It makes them easy to value optimistically, and the discipline is remembering that a memory care community and an active adult community share a demographic tailwind and almost nothing else.

The feasibility discipline has a matching correction. The tailwind is real and it is only now reaching the cohort that actually buys assisted living. But a demographic tailwind fills a building once. What keeps it full is a sales operation replacing more than half the residents every year, forever, and that is the number a feasibility study should be judged on.

For the cross-asset framework, demand regimes, valuation methods and reviewer tests, see the 2026 Feasibility Methodology Atlas.

Frequently asked questions

How is demand calculated for an assisted living feasibility study?

From households headed by someone aged 80 and over, not from the 65 and over population. Assisted living move-in ages cluster in the mid-eighties, so the 65 plus cohort that the sector has been citing since 2011 is largely not the cohort that buys the product. Memory care demand should be built on the 85 plus cohort. A study anchored on 65 plus growth is counting people who will not move in for another fifteen years.

Why should the demand pool be screened on assets rather than income?

Because private pay assisted living and memory care are funded from home equity and savings spent down across a residency, not from retirement income. Almost nobody has income equal to the cost of care, so an income screen set at the full cost excludes the entire market, and one set at a fraction of cost produces a number with no meaning. The right test is whether the household can fund the expected residency from assets net of income.

How many move-ins does a senior living community need each year?

More than most sponsors expect. At an assisted living median length of stay of roughly twenty-two months, a hundred-unit community needs about fifty-five move-ins a year simply to hold occupancy, every year. Unlike apartments, none of that turnover can be converted to renewals, because residents leave for clinical reasons no operator controls.

Does the marketing budget fall once a senior living community stabilises?

It should not. The sales function is permanent operating infrastructure rather than a lease-up cost, because the community is replacing more than half its residents annually forever. With placement agencies charging around a month's rent per referred move-in, the annual cost of simply standing still can run to several per cent of revenue in a year when occupancy does not move at all.

What is HUD Section 232?

The federal mortgage insurance programme for licensed residential care, covering assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing and board and care. It has separate branches for new construction and substantial rehabilitation and for the purchase or refinance of existing facilities. It requires a licensed facility, a replacement reserve, professional liability insurance, and on new construction an operating deficit escrow. Independent living on its own is generally not eligible.

Is assisted living eligible for SBA financing?

Yes, because care is an active operating business rather than passive real estate leasing, so the exclusion that keeps manufactured housing communities out of SBA does not apply. Assisted living sits on the special purpose property list, which raises the equity injection, and a third-party feasibility study is commonly required on a start-up, a new build or a repositioning.

*Prepared by UnionMetric Appraisal & Feasibility. Capitalisation rates, absorption expectations and operating metrics reflect published survey data at the date of writing and move with market conditions. Licensing, certificate of need and regulatory requirements are state-specific. These are planning references rather than substitutes for property-specific analysis. Last updated: 2026-07-31.*

*Feasibility methodology, demand and move-in arithmetic, lease-up carry examples and reserve schedules in this article are illustrative planning frameworks and require calibration to the subject market and community. Programme eligibility and parameters change and should be confirmed against the operative handbook or regulation at the date of application.*