Kenneth Bacon and Shankh Mitra

Talk about a growing niche.

Kenneth Bacon and Shankh Mitra have since October 2020 run Welltower, the largest senior housing landlord in the United States, a nation where thousands of new people become seniors every day. Indeed, the baby boomers are turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 a day this decade, according to federal figures. 

“The senior housing business continues to surpass our expectations,” Mitra said during a first-quarter 2024 earnings call. “Despite continued uncertainty with respect to the direction of the economy and turbulence across many sectors within commercial real estate, the demand-supply backdrop for senior housing gets better with each passing day.”

The Toledo, Ohio-based real estate investment trust recently put down $969 million to add to its portfolio another 25 age-restricted communities with about 3,900 apartments in the Pacific Northwest. Mitra said the company has closed or is under contract to close $2.6 billion of investments across 23 separate deals, and the company also anticipates an additional $660 million of development in 2024.

“As we have said in the past, our goal is to achieve significant regional density, seeking to go deep in our market, not broad,” Mitra said. “And, with the help of our data science platform Alpha, we are able to identify one asset at a time, which not only have the strongest growth prospects, but also the strongest fit to our portfolio.”