A real estate investor says senior housing is the biggest opportunity in 2026. Baby boomers turn 80 that year, but the market needs 500,000 to 700,000 new units by 2030 while construction is only meeting 25% of demand. He recommends looking for operators with strong expertise in growth markets, especially the Sun Belt.
Can I ask you a couple questions? Uh, wow, I knew that already. Um, oh, that's good advice. And what do you do for a living? We run a private equity group, real estate, commercial real estate. What kind of commercial real estate are you investing in?
Multiple types. We do multifamily apartments, we do self-storage, we do mobile home parks, car washes, uh, we've got Airbnbs, commercial, uh, office.
We've done it all. What, what's the best commercial real estate to be investing in in 2026?
I think people don't realize the crisis we're going to enter in assisted living and senior housing. Tell me about that. Yeah, so Senior housing was hit really hard during COVID worse than any other asset class. And in 2026, the first baby boomer turns 80. And in your early 80s, that's when you move into senior housing. And the problem is we haven't built enough of it. So we need 500,000 to 700,000 new units before 2030. We're only building about 25% of those right now.
So if I have $1 million right now and I'm looking to invest and you're looking at senior living, like, what should I be looking for in a senior living facility? If I have a— I'm a million-dollar investor and I want to invest in something like that.
If you got $1 million, I think that the opportunity is going to be in— really, there's a lot of markets around the country that are going to need senior housing. I think the Sun Belt's great. You want to move where people are moving to— Texas, Florida, the Carolinas— and you want to, you want to invest where their kids live. So you actually don't want to invest where people that are living in assisted living live. You want to live where their kids live. So you want to follow where they're moving, and then you want to find a solid operator. Because senior living, senior housing, it's heavily operation when it comes to that. It's very fractured. You have a lot of mom and pops. So multifamily, 75, 85% of multifamily is institutionally owned. It's the opposite, it's the inverse in senior housing.
