Investors Paying Premium Prices For Senior Living In Metro Atlanta

One of the priciest multifamily sales in the Atlanta area in the past half-year did not involve an apartment building or complex. 

Healthcare real estate REIT Healthpeak Properties shelled out a total of $240M in late February for a single senior living community in affluent West Cobb County in suburban Atlanta. 

Atlanta-based LLC West Cobb Senior Living sold Sterling Estates of West Cobb, a 244-unit senior living facility, in two transactions of $170M and $70M last month. The combined amount surpassed the top apartment sales transaction in the final quarter of 2025, according to records in the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority database.

The price for the facility surpasses the $150M paid by Bell Partners for 550 Rock Springs Place in Atlanta to Jamestown at the end of 2025, the highest price paid for multifamily in the fourth quarter of that year, according to Lee & Associates. 

Healthpeak isn’t alone in its willingness to shell out for senior living space in Atlanta, as investors anticipate increased demand for such assets and grasp the realities of a narrow senior living pipeline.

In February, Orlando-based Sentio Investments picked up Village Park Senior Living in Alpharetta for $99.4M and Village Park Peachtree Corners for $52.1M.

And in January, California-based LTC Properties Inc. bought three senior living properties encompassing nearly 400 units in Metro Atlanta operated by The Arbor Co. for $108M.

By the end of 2025, investors snapped up $24B in senior housing properties in the U.S., the highest level since 2015, according to JLL. Cap rates have been compressing as investors get more aggressive on pricing. Some 86% of investors surveyed by JLL say they plan to increase their allocations into the senior housing sector this year. 

The demand for senior housing in Atlanta is growing, but developers are lagging in adding new supply to the market to meet it — pushing occupancy and rents skyward. 

Newmark Vice Chairman Ryan Maconachy said the current state of play will likely be the prevalent market conditions for the near term.

“I don’t see any scenario where the industry delivers more than 10,000 units on an annual basis, this year, next year and the next year, honestly,” Maconachy said. “We’re in a really, really incredible period of no new supply, [and] demand from the silver tsunami.”

Construction fell off the map at the outset of the pandemic in 2020. New senior housing starts dropped 77% in primary markets from peak construction before the pandemic and have remained below 10-year averages, according to JLL. At the same time, rents have jumped nearly 30% since the pandemic to an average of more than $5,400 per month. 

The U.S. population ages 80 and older is expected to grow by 37% over the next decade, with some 10,000 Americans turning 65 each day during that period, according to JLL. 

This is when baby boomers will need the services senior housing can offer, and these facilities don’t carry the same stigma with that age group that nursing homes once did, said Matt Summerville, executive director of senior living facility Phoenix at James Creek in Cumming.

There are still available units in Metro Atlanta from a building boom prior to the pandemic, but not for long, he said. 

“Everybody’s occupancy is going up. There’s going to be a point here in the near future where there’s not going to be enough beds,” Summerville said. 

That dynamic is not lost on investors.

Paul Aase, the CEO of Atlanta-based senior housing developer Active Senior Cos., said he’s seeing a flood of investor and lender interest in acquiring senior housing properties in Metro Atlanta.

“Now, when something hits the market, there are multiple, multiple bids. You got lenders doing non-recourse financing for acquisitions,” Aase said. 

The firm operates Celebration Village properties in Acworth and Forsyth County.

Normally, when demand accelerates and prices rise, developers follow suit with new supply. But in the senior housing sector, a handful of leaders said they still expect new construction to lag. 

“Rents have to go up 20% to 40% in our estimation to make most [senior] developments pencil,” Ventas Inc. CEO Debra Cafaro said during Citi’s Miami Global Property CEO Conference this month. “Developments generally take at least three years, start to finish, sometimes more.”

And capital may remain tighter than it normally would given the market conditions. Andrew Mok, a director of equities research at Barclays Bank, told an audience at the bank’s annual healthcare conference this month that construction lenders are still gun-shy because developers prematurely unleashed a glut of units a decade earlier.

“There was a big boom in supply that occurred in 2015, '16, '17, which was a little premature in anticipation of the silver tsunami,” Mok said. “Many folks got burned, and they remember that very clearly.”

Aase’s firm is seeking limited partnership funding to break ground on three land parcels for senior housing projects in Metro Atlanta. Each campus would include up to 400 units in a mix of single-family cottage homes for active adults and independent living to assisted living and memory care units in a central village concept. 

Aase believes Active Senior Cos. and other senior living developers have correctly timed the wave of the silver tsunami to ride the crest for years to come, if the capital flows.

“I think senior housing is going to go on a run in the next 10 years or so that’s going to make the run-up on industrial properties look like a flash in the pan,” he said.