With the market for nursing homes showing no sign of slowing, an investment firm is looking to expand in the skilled nursing sector with a new team headed by Jason Dopoulos.
As managing principal of White Oak Healthcare Partners, a subset of White Oak Healthcare Finance, which is a subsidiary of White Oak Global Advisors — a $7 billion private equity fund that is mostly a debt fund — Dopoulos plans to get aggressive in the SNF market starting this month.
“We are bullish on the nursing home sector and continue to raise capital,” he said. “We can lend up to $250 million on any given transaction and will continue to pursue nursing home deals.”
White Oak Healthcare Finance recently funded a $25 million asset-based credit facility for Aspen Skilled Healthcare, acting as the sole lender and administrative agent to finance ongoing working capital. Aspen Skilled Healthcare has independent affiliates operating SNFs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In December 2020, White Oak Healthcare Finance also provided funding for a $110 million senior credit facility secured by nine skilled nursing facilities in Virginia.
While their team includes more than 60 professionals within the healthcare vertical, Dopoulos said his operation will be a little smaller.
“My venture, White Oak Healthcare Partners, is at 15 people with two new hires starting this fall,” he explained. “What I came over to do was start the permanent debt platform. We got our Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) license and we’re starting to work on debt advisory for our clients. We can work with agency finance as well for private pay clients.”
He expects White Oak to be well diversified between private pay and nursing homes and continue to offer asset-based lending (ABL) and direct balance sheet lending to nursing homes.
“I came over to supercharge originations and brought over colleagues I’ve known throughout the industry,” Dopoulos said.
Dopoulos joins White Oak after serving as senior managing director at Lancaster Pollard for many years.
“I had my time on the sidelines and now I’m ready [to talk] so people in the market know what we are up to,” he said.
With about a $1.5 billion book of balance sheet loans on its books, the majority of which are nursing homes, Dopoulos is open and ready to work with operators.
“We have no cap in mind for total exposure at this time as we are in growth mode,” Dopoulos added.
White Oak works with operators in several ways when structuring deals.
“We work with operators on working capital needs,” Dopoulos explained. “We’ve seen several banks get out of the sector so we’re very active in giving them their ABLs and working capital and we can talk to them about their real estate needs as well.”
Capital One Healthcare Real Estate senior managing director Jim Seymour told SNN in 2019 that while the McLean, Va.-based banking giant is still a significant originator of HUD transactions for skilled nursing, it hasn’t put anywhere near as much on the balance sheet in the last year or two as it had done historically.
However, banks are storming back in a big way right now in the sector, Dopoulos added, making his world very competitive.
“We can take someone from bridge loan all the way to HUD and we’re not a commercial bank, we get a little aggressive in terms of higher loan-to-cost, different covenant packages, but we’re really one of the bigger non-bank lenders to healthcare,” he added.
Dopoulos said that these days, operators need to have a bridge loan or a balance sheet to be competitive in the market.
Companies featured in this article:
Aspen Skilled Healthcare, Capital One, White Oak Global Advisors, White Oak Healthcare Finance, White Oak Healthcare Partners
