Shankh Mitra
CEO and chief investment officer at Welltower
Shankh Mitra has been running one of the nation’s — if not the world’s — most aggressive real estate investment trusts, specializing in housing and assisted living as the senior population surges into a “silver tsunami” or a “gray wave.”
Toledo, Ohio-based Welltower owns more than 1,500 senior and wellness communities across the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. Under Mitra’s leadership, the firm is growing its occupancy and deploying billions of dollars at a time into major acquisitions.
After closing $7 billion in investment activity in 2024 — which included $2.4 billion in acquisitions across 27 distressed transactions in the final quarter alone — Welltower kept its foot on the gas pedal. The REIT reported $9.2 billion of investment activity through mid-2025, and that’s not counting a $3.3 billion deal for 38 luxury senior housing communities and more development land in Canada, which is expected to close before the end of the year.
“Even after announcing a historic level of investment activity in the first quarter … our investment team has never been busier,” Mitra said during Welltower’s second-quarter earnings call. “We want to be in areas with a highly affluent [clientele], more difficult to build, and takes a long time to build. That’s the environment where we want to be.”
On the development side, Welltower also completed eight projects in the second quarter and invested $475 million in conversions and expansions. Operationally, Welltower posted a 13.8 percent year-over-year same-store net operating income increase, with its senior housing portfolio growing NOI by 23.4 percent.
“We reported 400 basis points of year-over-year growth in Q1 — the highest we’ve seen outside of post-COVID recovery,” Mitra said.
