Most commercial real estate brokers have driven past a senior housing facility without giving it a second thought. Chances are, there’s a multi-million dollar listing in that building and almost no one in your market positioned to close it.
eXp Commercial’s Senior Care Realty, a Wisconsin-based group led by Mike Collins, Daren Dudgeon and Bob Richards, operates exclusively in senior housing transactions. They recently closed a multi-facility assisted living portfolio in Central Wisconsin that had been in the works for over a decade.
eXp Commercial Director of Commercial Operations John LeTourneau sat down with the Senior Care Realty team to break down the transaction, what it takes to build a specialty senior housing practice, and why the next 15 years may make it one of the most defensible niches in commercial real estate. We’ve put together seven takeaways for brokers considering the niche.
1. Senior Housing Is a Niche Most Generalist Brokers Don’t Serve — and That’s the Opportunity
The senior housing asset class requires fluency in operational metrics, licensing law, change-of-ownership processes, and a buyer pool that doesn’t advertise itself publicly. Without all of those, the listing stalls.
“It’s not uncommon for commercial brokers to come across a listing like this and have no idea how to market it or who to market it to,” Dudgeon said.
Senior Care Realty was built on the premise that deep specialization in a single asset class — assisted living, independent living, and memory care facilities — creates a practice that compounds over time in ways a generalist practice can’t. Every transaction adds to the buyer network. Every coaching relationship with a seller builds credibility for the next one. Every closed deal sharpens the team’s ability to read what buyers will and won’t underwrite.
The result is a referral dynamic that works in both directions. Other brokers who land senior housing listings they can’t execute bring them to Senior Care Realty. “We just helped a broker in northern Wisconsin go under contract with a listing of his,” Dudgeon noted. “We helped him identify a buyer.”
For brokers evaluating where to focus their practice, keep in mind that the brokers who can’t serve senior housing listings are creating deal flow for those who can.
2. The Relationship Comes Before the Listing
The Central Wisconsin portfolio that Senior Care Realty just closed first surfaced around 2015 or 2016. The owner had reached out while the team was quietly marketing a separate property in the region.
At that first meeting, the seller’s price expectations were significantly above what his operations could support. Instead of taking the listing, the Senior Care Realty group began an advisory relationship. They focused on educating the owner on which metrics institutional buyers actually scrutinize, identifying where his financials needed to be, and outlining the operational work required to get there.
“We helped him understand really where the property should be marketed and where it will probably sell at,” Dudgeon said. “I feel as if we’re as much an advisor as we are anything — we’re helping them, whether they have an attorney or an accountant, advise them on how do you sell this, how do you navigate this process, how do you maximize the value.”
The seller wasn’t ready, and the formal engagement paused. Collins — who had since stepped back from Senior Care Realty’s day-to-day — continued fielding calls from the owner informally, advising on occupancy, expense management, and payer mix. The relationship held and years later, when the numbers finally supported the ask, the listing came back to Senior Care Realty without a competitive process.
For brokers in senior housing, the advisor relationship is the pipeline. Owners who aren’t ready to sell today are often the most valuable conversations to have, because by the time they are ready, the trust is already built.
3. Knowing the Metrics Buyers Use Is a Core Value-Add
To serve senior housing clients effectively, brokers need to understand what sophisticated buyers actually underwrite, and be able to coach sellers toward those metrics before the listing goes out.
In assisted living transactions, the key variables are occupancy rate, private-pay versus public-pay ratio, operating expense ratios, labor costs as a percentage of revenue, and the quality of financial reporting. Institutional buyers and REITs run structured due diligence against all of them. Family-owned operators frequently haven’t structured their reporting to match what buyers and lenders expect.
“We start educating them about that process, and then they start blending that into their operations,” Dudgeon said. “That includes occupancy rate, making sure you’re maximizing revenue. But in our world there’s also a large percentage of public pay and public support — so how much is private, how much is public? That’s something they stay aware of.”
The broker who can walk into a seller meeting and identify which line items are out of alignment, and articulate specifically what needs to change and why, is providing a service that no generalist can replicate. That advisory capability is also what makes it possible to take a listing with confidence because by the time the property goes to market, the financial story is defensible under scrutiny.
“If you have these things in place, once we start marketing, it’s just gonna become much easier to generate bids when the information’s there,” Dudgeon said.
4. Confidential Marketing Requires a Pre-Built Buyer Network, Not a Portal Listing
Assisted living facilities don’t go on LoopNet. The operational sensitivity of a potential ownership change — staff uncertainty, resident and family anxiety, regulatory implications — means that confidential, targeted outreach is the standard, not the exception.
That model only works if the broker already has the buyers. A curated list assembled at the time of listing isn’t a buyer network. It’s a cold call list.
For the Wisconsin portfolio, Richards compiled a targeted list of roughly 25 to 30 buyer groups — organized by acquisition criteria, portfolio strategy, and geographic appetite — built from 16-plus years of closed transactions. He and the team walked the opportunity to each group individually.
“We just started working through that list,” Richards said. “As Darren mentioned, we kind of started walking it out to these groups on an individual basis.”
Of those 25 to 30 groups, four or five emerged as serious. The seller received three or four formal offers. The eventual buyer wasn’t actively acquiring at the time — Richards surfaced the opportunity through a separate engagement. The buyer visited the site within days. That speed, LeTurneau noted, signals real intent in a way that “send me the OM and I’ll call you back” never does.
The buyer network is what makes confidential marketing functional rather than theoretical. For brokers building a senior housing practice, it’s the asset that takes the longest to develop, and the one that ultimately determines deal flow.
5. In Senior Housing, You Sell the Deal Multiple Times
Getting a senior housing transaction under contract is not the same as closing it. The process of keeping a deal alive through to closing is, in many ways, a separate sales job running in parallel with the original one.
“The listing’s the first sale,” Collins said. “You gotta keep making sales and never sit on your backside and wait for the deal to come to you. You gotta go out and sell it to the next stage — whether that’s the lender, the buyers, the licensing folks, everybody that’s involved.”
Senior housing transactions involve a licensed business, not just a real estate asset. A change of ownership triggers a separate licensing application process with the state, adding a timeline that runs outside the broker’s control and can create its own complications. Add to that the buyer’s operational due diligence team, their legal counsel, the lender, and the lender’s appraiser, and the broker’s job is to hold the deal together through each stage.
“Throughout the process there’s a lot of moving pieces,” Dudgeon said. “These buildings include licensing. Not only are you talking about the sale of operations and the sale of real estate, but you also have a business that’s licensed and there has to be a new license application and a whole process that is completely out of our hands.”
Brokers who enter this space expecting it to close like a standard investment sale will be caught off guard. Those who understand the multi-stage nature of the transaction can manage client expectations, anticipate friction points, and keep deals on track.
6. The Demographic Case Is No Longer an Argument — It’s Happening
Senior housing brokers have been citing demographic tailwinds for years. In 2026, the leading edge of the baby boom generation turns 80 — the age at which seniors historically begin transitioning into assisted living. The wave is no longer approaching. It has arrived.
“Over the next 15 years, you have about 75 million people pushing through that demographic,” Dudgeon said. “And one of the groups that has the most wealth — I think they have half the wealth of the United States — that demographic.”
Collins, who has remained active in senior housing operations alongside brokerage work, confirmed that the market dynamics are shifting at the facility level as well. Average resident ages and average lengths of stay are both rising. And older facilities that were built for a different era of resident expectations are becoming increasingly difficult to operate competitively, driving transaction volume as owners who can’t keep up look for an exit.
“Some of the older properties are becoming somewhat obsolete or need to be repurposed or refurbished,” Collins said. “Owners either aren’t willing or just aren’t capable of keeping their properties in the competitive forefront.”
For brokers, there are senior housing owners in virtually every regional market who are either considering an exit or who should be. Most of them haven’t been approached by a broker who actually understands their asset class.
“I gotta think there’s a $50 million listing in your backyard,” Dudgeon said.
7. Specialization Makes the Practice Defensible
Senior Care Realty doesn’t do anything outside senior housing. No industrial, no multifamily, no leasing, no development. Every relationship, every buyer on their list, every piece of market intelligence they carry traces back to a single asset class worked exclusively across decades.
That focus creates a reputation effect that compounds. Buyers know that when Senior Care Realty brings them a deal, it has been underwritten seriously. Sellers know that the team understands their operational reality in a way a generalist never could. Neither of those things is possible to fake.
“They knew based on the quality of your name, your group, and the experience you all have, that you’re throwing a real deal at them,” LeTurneau observed. “You’re putting them to bat because there’s an actual opportunity there.”
The specialization model is also what creates durability against market cycles. Senior housing demand isn’t discretionary in the way that office or retail absorption is. The demographic pressure is structural, the buyer pool is expanding, and the inventory of family-owned facilities looking for exits is growing. The brokers who have built genuine expertise in this asset class, such as buyer relationships, operational knowledge and regulatory fluency, are positioned to work one of the most supply-constrained niches in commercial real estate.
“Never, ever, ever get into this for the short term,” Collins said. “Get into it for the long term. If you’re into it for the short term, just go find something else to do.”
What It Takes to Enter the Senior Housing Brokerage Space
Dudgeon is actively looking for brokers who want to specialize in senior housing. The entry point, he suggests, is getting involved in the industry itself through state assisted living associations, national senior housing conferences, owner and operator networks. “Get yourself involved,” he said. “Lean into the industry, give back.”
Collins framed the long-term payoff plainly: “Every hour I ever gave, I got back 10 and 20 fold — not necessarily just financially, but in terms of connections, network, experience, wisdom that might have cost me a transaction otherwise.”
This Central Wisconsin portfolio took 11 years from first conversation to closing. It’s not a typical timeline, and Senior Care Realty would be the first to say so. They’ve also closed deals in seven days. But the 11-year deal is instructive precisely because it held together a sustained advisory relationship, an honest read of the market, and the patience to wait until the asset was actually ready.
The combination of advisory credibility, operational knowledge, and a curated buyer network is what set them apart, and they brought the deal to the closing table on June 1.
Read more about their landmark Central Wisconsin senior living portfolio.
This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. eXp Commercial and its affiliates do not guarantee any investment outcomes or returns. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult with qualified financial, legal, and tax professionals before making any investment decisions.