Industry Veteran Launches Vita Senior Living, Targets Distress Opportunities

A senior living veteran is launching a company aimed at acquiring and improving underperforming communities in The Sunshine State.

The company is Vita Senior Living, a real estate, development, and management firm based in Orlando, Florida. CEO Scott McCorvie announced the company’s launch Tuesday.

Vita’s strategy will center on acquiring underperforming communities with strong potential upside and improving them with upgraded unit mixes, lighting, technology, operations and amenities. The company is planning to acquire between five and seven properties in Florida by the end of 2022.

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McCorvie was most recently CFO and executive vice president of investments with Alta Senior Living, an operator that launched about one year ago. Like Vita, Alta’s strategy was one of opportunity and improvement amid a historically downtrodden senior living marketplace.

Vita’s launch comes in the 23rd month of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the senior living industry is in a period of rebounding occupancy, it is also seeing a period of labor shortages and supply chain disruptions. Given those headwinds, McCorvie believes conditions are ripe for executing his new company’s strategy.

Also making now the right time is the fact that McCorvie is seeing an exodus of senior living real estate investor groups to other assets such as multifamily and medical office. The company’s leaders are also seeing distressed communities in Florida priced at 20% to 40% of replacement cost and 30% to 60% of previous acquisition cost, according to Vita’s website.

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“Now’s the time to buy,” McCorvie told Senior Housing News. “I think there’s a lot of distress and disruption in the senior living environment.”

The company also plans to use benchmarking analysis tools and other industry resources to uncover any performance irregularities during underwriting.

Vita’s strategy

Each senior living investment Vita plans to make will come with a specific strategy to update the design and the aesthetic appeal of the property, ranging from repositioning projects to minor changes.

Beyond upgrading the properties themselves, Vita also plans to implement operational changes.

“Better policies and procedures on some of the labor practices can really make a difference in the bottom line,” said McCorvie. “We can go in [to communities] and, with some upgraded training, hiring, and scheduling policies, make corrective changes quickly.”

Vita also plans to make improvements in areas such as expense management, agency contracts, vendor management, group purchasing, advertising and technology.

Vita will focus exclusively on primary and secondary markets in Florida for the foreseeable future, as that is where the company’s expertise lies. The benefits of staying in one footprint are clear to McCorvie.

“From my experience, having close proximity to the communities is a big advantage on the operations,” he said. “And we can be experts in each market instead of trying to figure out the markets as we go..”

The company will specifically look to acquire independent living, assisted living and memory care communities with about 40 units and large national or regional operators managing them.

“We’re really searching for those opportunities that have a national [or] regional operator that we can transition out,” McCorvie said.

McCorvie, who has worked in senior living for nearly two decades, has previous experience acquiring and improving various communities.

Vita also is launching with a strategic advisory team that includes SRI Management CEO Don Bishop, former Connected Living Chief Global Strategy and Innovation Officer Sanjeev Shetty and industry veteran Debbie Howard, who also heads up Senior Living Smart as CEO.

Prior to joining Alta as CFO and chief investment officer, McCorvie launched his own consulting firm, Senior Living Growth Advisors, aimed at assisting companies in seniors housing with acquisitions, development projects, and asset management platforms.

McCorvie also previously worked as Vice President of Acquisitions for CNL Financial Group and Manager of Investments for Sentio Investments.

He spent his earlier years in the industry doing appraisals for senior living communities.

“Digging through the financials of all of the national regional operators was a great foundation of experience,” he said. “I got to understand best practices and what really is efficient for each department in these communities.”

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