Marquis Companies Finds Success Building New Facilities Rather Than Renovating Existing Ones

At a time when skilled nursing assets are getting record-setting price per bed valuations, Milwaukie, Ore-based Marquis Companies plans to continue to grow in the space by building from the ground up.

“We’ve only been building new facilities for about 11 years now, so we haven’t acquired any facilities,” Phil Fogg Jr., president and CEO of Marquis, told Skilled Nursing News. “Everything we do is for the boomer consumer. If it’s a post-acute facility it’s private rooms, it’s more amenities in their room and less large common areas like a traditional skilled facility.”

Marquis is working to open a new SNF in Salem, Ore., and while staffing shortages and rising construction costs have caused some delays, it will soon join the company’s 28 post-acute rehab, long-term care, assisted living, home health care and memory care facilities throughout Oregon, California and Nevada.

Advertisement

“We’re trying to build new facilities that people want to go to. That’s how you capture market share,” Fogg said. “At the end of the day it’s consumer-driven.”

Fogg sees the nursing home industry focusing more on higher acuity care with shorter stays moving forward, with an emphasis on specialty care units such as geriatric psych , ventilators or another chronic disease based units.

“I think that you’re going to see the marketplace continue to migrate to assisted living community based care, home care, especially the markets that can afford it, and the nursing facility today is going to continue to migrate towards post-acute care,” he said. “I think over the next 10 years you’re going to see that and it’s one of the reasons I don’t see a large increase in nursing facility bed supply.”

Advertisement

While some operators have been hesitant to add home-based services, Fogg said it’s no different from other post-acute care trends he’s seen in the past.

“I was in Oregon, we were the first state to do assisted living under a waiver program, it was like 1982-1983, and nursing home providers at the time were adamantly opposed to it,” he explained. “Now almost all of us have assisted living. We migrated into it because the consumer wanted it.”

He referenced the Choose Home Care Act of 2021, which was introduced in the House of Representatives earlier this month, and while he still thinks there is a large portion of the marketplace for nursing homes that the act doesn’t cover, he’d like to see it reworked.

The legislation is intended to give Americans more choice on where to recover following a hospital stay and would create an add-on payment to the traditional Medicare home health benefit for patients 30 days after their hospital discharge.

“I just think that the bill is not thoroughly thought out,” Fogg said. “From a policy perspective, I’m not opposed to it. I think they missed things in the bill such as how medications are going to be dispensed and managed.”

As Marquis continues to adjust to current industry trends, such moving to private rooms and adding higher acuity care, Fogg has simply found it easier to implement those strategies at new facilities than it is to redevelop an older one.

“I think at some point, just like in the 60’s with federal dollars moved to hospitals, I think at some point the federal government will need to address this issue,” he said. “I don’t know if it will be HUD specifically or some other government entity and that there will have to be federal funding because … reinvesting in an older facility is more expensive than just tearing it down and building a new one and I learned that long ago.”

Companies featured in this article: