July 7, 2025
Industry Needs to Get Leaner to Serve the Middle Market
In this Senior Living Minute, Dennis Murphy explains why addressing the senior living middle market challenge requires a more streamlined approach. With affordability being a top concern, Dennis describes how buying at a lower basis and controlling expenses, especially labor, are essential to offering rents around $4,000 instead of $6,000–$7,000.
Learn why the most successful middle market providers will be the ones that do more with less.
Guest: Dennis Murphy | Join the Discussion on LinkedIn! 💬
Transcript: Industry Needs to Get Leaner to Serve the Middle Market
The way that we’ll be able to solve many of these middle market problems will be buying on a lower basis, and therefore not requiring the same NLI to be successful. If you’re trying to do it with new development, it’s probably much more difficult.
The best middle market operators and solutions out there are going to come from those who are the leanest, so they may have more just frontline staff, the people who are truly in there doing all the work and are very good at controlling their labor cost and very good at controlling every other line item of controllable expenses in that PNL.
So you can’t afford to run fat if you’re going to solve this middle market problem on the expense side, so it requires a very lean operator and buying at a very low basis to be able to reduce the rent from $6,000 and $7,000 for assisted living down to $4,000.