The National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) is pursuing a new strategic plan, President and CEO Ray Braun announced Thursday at the organization’s spring conference in San Diego.
“This is a time of change, challenge and opportunity for the senior housing and health care sectors,” Braun said. “The NIC strategic plan positions us to proactively address these changes and serve as a catalyst for evolution in the industry.”
NIC is launching this plan about five months after Braun took on the CEO role.
“The board has been working on the strategic plan for a while … and I think they wanted to have proven leadership around new initiatives,” he told Senior Housing News.
Braun is a proven leader in the sector, having previously been president of Health Care REIT — now known as Welltower (NYSE: WELL) — as well as a former board member and chair of NIC.
The new plan includes five key focus areas, which represent the highest priority topics for NIC to “develop insights, perform impactful research and engage new stakeholders,” Braun said. These focus areas are:
- Partnering for health
- The middle market
- Active adult
- Capital for operations
- AgeTech
NIC already has pursued initiatives in these areas and will now continue to build on this work, such as the “Forgotten Middle” study that quantified the middle-market opportunity for senior living, and the effort to define and gather data on active adult rental properties. The spring conference this year has largely been dedicated to the intersection of senior housing and health care, and research with NORC will also focus on relevant topics — notably analyzing health outcomes in senior living.
Among other initiatives related to AgeTech, NIC this year will hold an inaugural data and analytics conference in Minneapolis, in September.
With regard to “capital for operations,” Braun told SHN that the capital raising for senior living historically has “centered on the real estate.” NIC will be exploring ways to separate the operating companies to raise money independently of real estate, “which hasn’t been easy to do.”
While explaining the new strategic plan, including these key focus areas, Braun also emphasized continuity.
“Our mission remains the same, however: to enable access and choice by providing data analytics and connections that bring together investors and providers,” he said.
Fee Stubblefield, CEO of The Springs Living and a member of NIC’s board, argued that key to the strategy is increased partnership and transparency among providers, so that they can learn from each other’s failures and successes in a time when change is occurring rapidly and experimentation is demanded in arenas such as health care partnerships.
“It’s world-changing in our focus on where we’re going,” Stubblefield said of the strategic plan.
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