Kenneth Bacon and Shankh Mitra

Turns out senior housing is a good investment, if Welltower’s year in 2024 is anything to go by. 

Look at the real estate investment trust’s latest quarterly figures. The REIT’s same store net operating income surged by nearly 24 percent in the final three months of 2024 — its ninth straight quarter of growth over 20 percent. Its revenue at the end of last year, meanwhile, hit $2.25 billion. Not only was the final quarter 2024 just the second time in the company’s history that its quarterly revenue surpassed $2 billion (the first time being the previous quarter), it’s a more than $500 million bump in revenue year-over-year. 

The Toledo, Ohio-based REIT that Kenneth Bacon chairs is the largest senior housing owner in the U.S., with over 1,500 senior and wellness housing communities as well as more than 26 million square feet of outpatient medical facilities. And it’s still investing heavily into growing its portfolio as other owners wade in distress from mortgage defaults. The company throughout 2024 spent $7 billion on new assets, development projects and equity investments, including $2.4 billion to buy assets in just the fourth quarter alone. 

It’s a trend Welltower plans to continue throughout 2025. The company managed to close $2 billion of acquisitions across 27 separate deals within the first 45 days of 2025, as it plans to deploy some $8.7 billion in liquidity throughout this year. As a matter of fact, the company’s investment teams have never been busier, CEO Shankh Mitra told investors during Welltower’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February.

“This is the strongest start of the year we ever had,” Mitra said. “Our phones are ringing off the hook, as it is sinking in to the real estate world that the [Federal Reserve] does not control the long end of the curve and hence is not coming to rescue broken capital structures.”