With record-setting pricing seen across the nursing home sector in 2021, one of the leading health care advisory firms is making some changes at the top to better capitalize on an ever-changing market.
Blueprint Healthcare Real Estate Advisors – which recently facilitated the sale of a 167-bed independent living, assisted living and skilled nursing facility in Nampa, Idaho and completed a $51 million sale of two SNFs in Florida – announced key leadership changes last week.
Co-founders Ben Firestone and Jacob Gehl have moved to new roles, with Firestone taking over as CEO and Gehl as chief vision officer.
In addition, Ryan Chase, Michael Segal and Steve Thomes have been named partners and executive managing directors.
Blueprint wants to tweak the traditional commercial real estate brokerage model and focus on health care, according to leadership. As chief vision officer, Gehl will be primarily tasked with developing and executing the firm’s long-term growth plan, he told Skilled Nursing News.
“We’ve been trying to think differently and reimagine how investment advisory is done from the beginning,” he said. “I think the primary function of the chief strategy officer is to stay in front of changes to the business landscape and focus on innovation.”
Since the firm’s inception in 2013, Blueprint has experienced “considerable growth” as its year-to-date activity has already reached 15 transactions valued at $500 million, representing deals in seniors housing, skilled nursing and the medical office space. Its current offerings represent an additional $3.7 billion in market value.
“We’ve made a pretty substantial push into medical offices during Covid, which has worked out really well,” Gehl explained. “Our first full year in the business we did about $150 million in medical office sales and that’s a number that we want to see grow.”
He added that they are taking a “deep dive” into behavioral health right now to figure out what that looks like and how Blueprint will “attack” it.
Though transactional mergers and acquisitions work in skilled nursing has always been the firm’s “bread and butter” and Gehl doesn’t see that changing.
“That’s certainly a segment that we’re really good at, we’ve got a lot of relationships in that space, we’ve done a lot of institutional dispositions for REITs,” he said. “We have a robust middle market there and we don’t see that stopping at all.”
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