How to Find and Sell to Senior Living Facilities

4 days ago

5 min read

Senior living has a massive market size valued at $943 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research. The senior living industry includes assisted living, nursing, adult care, active 55+ communities, and memory care. It’s expected to continue to grow over the next 10 years. As a supplier, vendor or contractor looking to grow in commercial real estate, how can you expand into this market?

The reality is that selling to senior living can be a challenge, especially if your business is new to the market. Sellers have cited tight budgets, strict healthcare compliance rules, and high staff turnover as challenges with selling into senior living (see subreddit forum, “Does anyone sell to senior living facilities”).

There is still opportunity for a vendor partner who understands the market: Senior living management will prioritize lowering operational and labor costs. They care about passing health inspections and maintaining facilities that are attractive to residents. CRE vendors may find opportunities if they’re able to provide long-term support in any of these areas.

Understanding the Senior Living CRE Market

The senior living CRE market encompasses many different types of senior care and active living communities. Understanding the various types helps you know where your business might fit as a vendor or service partner:

Independent Living

Communities where residents live independently, without daily care assistance; also marketed as 55+ or retirement communities. Independent living communities tend to offer a maintenance-free and amenity-driven lifestyle, which present opportunities for service providers like commercial landscaping, professional cleaning and maintenance companies.

Assisted Living

These senior living facilities are intended for adults who need assistance with daily living. Services range from transportation and housekeeping to laundry and on-site nursing. Residents are still largely active, though they may have health concerns or mobility limitations. Assisted living carries a heavier operational load than independent living, with more staff, more regulated systems, and more building wear. Any vendor whose service touches daily facility operations, resident safety, or accessibility has a reason to be in the conversation.

Nursing Homes

Licensed facilities providing round-the-clock nursing care and other specialized services. Residents may stay long-term or temporarily, such as after surgery or another intensive medical procedure. Funding sets these facilities apart from the rest of senior living, since much of their revenue comes through Medicare and Medicaid rather than private pay. Reimbursement rates are set outside the facility, which means budgets are tighter and less flexible than at private-pay communities, and vendors selling in should expect longer approval cycles, closer scrutiny of cost, and more documentation than a market-rate property would require.

Memory Care

A licensed nursing facility that’s designed for residents who have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Memory care usually costs more than assisted living because residents require around-the-clock assistance with daily living. Staff also require specialized training to work at memory care facilities. The physical environment does more work in memory care than anywhere else in senior living, with secured entries, wander management systems, and design choices aimed at orientation and safety. Vendors whose work shapes how a building is navigated or secured have a clear opening.

Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC)

A larger senior living campus that offers multiple types of senior living communities in one area. CCRCs are a long-term solution that new residents pay an entrance fee or rent, depending on the contract type. They offer a continuum of care intended for adults to move between care types as they age. Scale is what makes a CCRC worth pursuing. One campus can hold independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing under a single operator, so one relationship covers several building types at once.

Using Biscred to Identify Senior Living Decision Makers

Senior living facilities can be owned by real estate investment trusts, private equity firms, or institutional investors, although these institutional owners are rarely involved in decision-making. Senior living can also be owned by nonprofits, regional operators, and owner-operators. To identify the key decision-makers responsible for operating the senior living facility, set Biscred’s database Company Asset Experience filter to Senior Living.

In this example, Biscred lists 16,169 companies and 458,252 people in the database with the asset class senior living.*

If we narrow down our search to property management, operators, REIF and REIT: 3,693 companies, 198,418 people

This is still a lot of companies, people, and buildings, so let’s narrow our search to a region, the Southwest: AZ, TX, NM, OK.

Now, our search finds 590 companies and 102,614 people.

If this is still a daunting number, Biscred can filter results even further by role seniority or job functional areas like engineering, leasing, operations, and property management.

Tips for Contacting Senior Living Owners and Operators

Senior living facilities have tight budgets and limited resources, and operators won’t be impulsive about spending on a vendor they don’t see a lot of benefits in doing business with. You may have a narrow window of opportunity to contact and capture the attention of decision-makers.

You might contact senior living management during operational off-peak times (such as outside meal times), visit the facility in person, and build a relationship with staff. Get to know what their pain points are, so you might offer sincere solutions.

When you do eventually contact the decision-makers, lead with a specific pain point that your business addresses rather than a product pitch. Your solution focuses on benefits like saving staff time, reducing expenses and risks, and creating more value for the community. Learn the compliance and regulatory requirements of their type of senior living and remember that regulation is often state-specific.

Finally, senior living contracts may have longer sales cycles and slower response times than other types of CRE. Expect vendor approval to take time, and understand that for your business, senior living can be a long-term time investment.

Biscred Helps to Connect You to the Right Decision Makers

For vendors that want to do business with senior living communities, Biscred is a platform built specifically for the commercial real estate industry. Our datasets are updated continuously with hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of CRE professionals.

We’ve demonstrated how you can save your sales team time by creating searches that filter by job title, industry, and functional area. Once you’ve conducted your search, Biscred exports data in formats compatible with most sales platforms. Biscred even connects with some of the most popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. Additionally, Biscred offers paid media management as a service.

*Biscred continuously updates its database. Numbers reported throughout our website represent a snapshot in time.