By: Lara Gartner, Managing Director, Executive Search and Head of the Healthcare Real Estate Practice at Ferguson Partners
The longevity economy long anticipated by the sector is finally here, and institutional capital is following. With it comes leadership demands that exceed what the sector’s existing talent base can supply on its own.
Hiring outside the sector is not simply a concession to scarcity. It is a strategic choice – one that leading organizations are making with intention.
A Sector at Scale Needs Leaders Who Have Operated at Scale
Senior housing is, at its core, a business of distributed operations, complex consumer relationships, and a workforce that requires significant investment to recruit, retain, and develop. These are not unique challenges. They are the defining challenges of industries like hospitality, retail, and restaurant — sectors that have spent decades building the systems, cultures, and leadership capabilities to address them.
Yet senior housing has been slow to recruit from those industries at the executive level. The reasons are understandable: for the owner, the underwriting is operationally driven in ways that other real estate isn’t: occupancy, care acuity mix, labor cost as a percentage of revenue, and rate growth all behave differently than any other asset class; for the operator, the regulatory environment is demanding, and the emotional weight of the senior living is unlike anything in retail or multi-family. These are real considerations but there is a strong case to be made to consider talent from outside the sector.
Where the Talent Lives
As senior living operators compete increasingly on experience, hospitality has long been the most obvious source of crossover talent. The service culture, the physical environment, and the guest model share meaningful similarities with a well-run senior living community.
But the opportunity extends beyond hospitality. Multifamily has financial and asset management rigor that has not fully migrated into the senior housing industry. Leaders out of technology know how to build scalable systems and leverage data and analytics in ways that drive better decisions faster. Healthcare services companies such as behavioral health services and home health platforms have regulatory expertise and a deep understanding of the care side.
An emerging pipeline includes retail and restaurant leaders who have solved, at scale, the same workforce challenges that are among the most pressing issues in senior housing today as they’ve built brand consistency and consumer loyalty across distributed locations. Examples of executives from these sectors moving into the senior housing executive suite remain rare. The talent is there – the sector has simply not pursued or vetted it in a deliberate way.
The Real Risks and How to Manage
The risk of hiring outside the industry differs depending on where you sit. For the operator, the exposure is immediate. The regulatory environment takes real time to learn and absorb. The workforce dynamics and frontline culture are distinct and critical to manage. And the weight of the responsibility to residents and their families is frequently underestimated by executives coming from sectors where the stakes, however high commercially, do not carry the same human weight. The cost shows up in care outcomes, survey exposure, and staff trust, none of which recover quickly.
For a private owner or owner/operator, the risk is financial. An executive needs to quickly bridge the learning curve on operationally-driven underwriting with its occupancy dynamics, care acuity mix, and labor cost as a percentage of revenue, in order to make good capital allocation decisions. Understanding and knowing how to manage the operating fundamentals – this is how a strong real estate investor becomes a strong senior housing investor.
For REITs, the risk is less about the day-to-day operations and more about accountability: holding operators to business plans, identifying and addressing
problems early, reading market trends and knowing when to act on them, and being able to communicate performance to investors. A REIT executive must understand what actually drives NOI in a senior community in order to succeed. The cost of getting that wrong is measured in portfolio performance and investor confidence.
With the right structure and support, the risks are manageable. Organizations that hire outside the industry successfully tend to share a few characteristics: operational depth in the layers below the incoming leader, a realistic timeline to productivity, and a deliberate onboarding investment rather than an assumption that strong leaders will just figure it out. The role also matters – does the position require deep regulatory knowledge from day one or is it a strategic role where vision, financial leadership, or transformation is key?
A Deliberate Approach, Not a Compromise
While the senior housing sector continues to grow faster than it can develop its own talent, the conversation about hiring outside the sector should be framed as a strategic choice. The most forward-thinking owners and operators are thinking differently about capital structures, technology adoption, brand positioning, and workforce strategy in ways that will benefit from leaders with broader experience outside of senior living.
Identifying the right roles, however, is only half of the equation. The other half is building the conditions for outside hires to be accretive: organizational depth in the layers below the incoming leader to bridge gaps in sector fluency, an investment in a structured onboarding plan, and a realistic timeline, set deliberately, to full productivity.
Lara Gartner is Managing Director, Executive Search and Head of the Healthcare Real Estate Practice at Ferguson Partners. She focuses on executive and board-level search across the senior housing sector. www.fergusonpartners.com