Creator: Patrick Connole
NIC: What’s in Pipeline for Stagnant Sr. Housing Supply?
NIC said it has new analysis on the gap between supply and demand of senior housing, releasing fresh data at its fall conference in Chicago.
It’s no mystery to senior housing stakeholders that demand is high for assisted living units and other senior living settings at the same time new construction constraints result in lagging supply.
Just as the great baby boom entry into long-term care hits, there is a lack of housing to satisfy demand. To help answer what’s next in the supply pipeline, NIC experts gathered for the first full day of the group’s fall conference in Chicago released a new report to dig into the issues at hand.
Lisa McCracken who oversees NIC’s research and analytics team, and spoke at the welcome session on Oct. 21, in a previous blog said senior housing construction starts have fallen every year since 2021, dropping 67 percent to roughly 10,000 units in 2025 — a level last seen after the 2008 financial crisis.
“The causes mirror those across commercial real estate broadly: high interest rates, elevated construction costs, and labor constraints. Senior housing carries an added headwind: operating margins, while recovering, remain below pre-2020 levels, so many projects that penciled out in 2019 still don’t work financially today,” she said in the blog, and reiterated in Chicago.
The result is a widening gap, McCracken said. “In 2022, 80+ population growth overtook senior housing inventory growth for the first time this decade, and NIC MAP projects that gap will continue widening through 2030, with population growth approaching 7 percent annually against inventory growth near 1 percent,” she said in the blog.
To maintain national occupancy at 90 percent as the population ages, NIC MAP’s model shows the industry needs to deliver more than 100,000 new units in most years between 2025 and 2035 — with a spike above 141,000 units required in 2027 alone.
“The current development pace of roughly 10,445 units a year covers only a fraction of that. Even the industry’s highest-ever 12-month total this century, 56,145 units, would cover only about half of a typical year’s need,” McCracken said in the blog.
The Pipeline
In the pipeline report issued in Chicago, some of the key highlights reflected potential future supply to help fill the aforementioned widening gap with demand.
- In the second quarter of 2026, 88,283 units were in the planning pipeline across 214 NIC MAP Markets, with 95.2 percent associated with new property development.
- The pipeline remains largely upstream: 94.5 percent of units were in pre-planning, while just 5.5 percent reached the bidding or final planning stage.
- The pipeline also showed a coastal concentration: The Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, Pacific, and Northeast regions collectively accounted for approximately 77 percent of units in planning.
New Health Outcomes Study
Separately, NIC said it is partnering with Healthsperien, a nationally recognized health policy consulting firm, to launch a multi-phase research initiative identifying the nation’s top performing senior living communities for resident health outcomes.
By examining what these communities do differently in care, staffing, and related operational strategies, the study aims to uncover practices that improve resident health outcomes and expand senior living’s value to residents, families, and investors, NIC said.
The collaboration builds on previous NIC-funded research that revealed senior living residents are more likely to live longer, have fewer hospitalizations, and benefit from improved quality of life compared to older adults who live in the community.
The initiative launches this month and will continue into next year, with a capstone report planned for fall 2027, NIC said.
Other NIC Notes
Raymond Braun, president and CEO of NIC, also speaking in Chicago said NIC has more than 3,650 people at the fall conference, “our largest attendance on record, and up more than 10 percent from last fall including more than 230 new companies and 750 individuals attending a NIC conference for the first time.”
Comments or questions? Contact Patrick Connole at pconnole@parkplacelive.com.
