Retirement Unlimited Inc. (RUI) President Doris-Ellie Sullivan has left her post as president, while CEO William Fralin is continuing to lead the company, the operator has confirmed.
Sullivan “resigned from her position at RUI to pursue other opportunities,” a spokesperson for the Roanoke, Virginia-based company told Senior Housing News Thursday. The operator did not further elaborate on the leadership change or its next moves.
Sullivan, a 2023 Senior Housing News Changemaker, first joined RUI in 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile. She entered the senior housing and care industry in the 1990s by way of the U.S. Army, and also worked as a skilled nursing administrator in that time.
Under Sullivan’s leadership, RUI had grown substantially from the six communities it had eight years ago. The leadership change comes less than a year after a major growth spurt for RUI. In late 2023, RUI acquired Brandywine Living in a deal that greatly increased the operator’s community count. Terms of that acquisition were not disclosed at the time.
The deal gave RUI a new foothold in New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania. At the time, Sullivan noted that the alignment of the two companies’ cultures and missions – and partnerships with Welltower (NYSE: WELL) – “will aid in the integration of these well-located and market-leading communities.”
As of earlier this year, the operator ranked No. 17 on the Argentum 150 list of the nation’s largest operators with 72 communities in the U.S. Retirement Unlimited was also among the fastest-growing operators in the U.S. in 2024.
In 2023, Welltower CEO Shankh Mitra identified RUI as among the company’s top-performing operating partners months after the two companies announced a new programmatic partnership and launched a new luxury-focused senior living brand called Elance. Today, there are seven Elance-branded communities in Virginia and Florida, according to the company’s website.
RUI is not the only senior living operator to have reported the departure of a top leader this week. On Wednesday, Westminster Communities of Florida announced that CEO Terry Rogers had also stepped down, with CFO Hank Keith stepping in to temporarily fill the role.
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