Atria Ceo: Senior Living Operators ‘can’t Get Complacent’ About Looming Demand Wave

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Senior living operators have prepared for the baby boomers’ arrival for decades – but now is not the time to rest on their laurels, according to Atria Senior Living CEO Holly Belter-Chesser.

At a recent conference, she spoke with other industry professionals about the opportunity ahead in 2025 and how far the industry has come. The conversation turned to recovery, and how well senior living operators have bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic. To Belter-Chesser, that is only half the battle.

“They commented on how the current moment feels pretty good, but that they were just waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Belter-Chesser said. “I stopped them and said we’ve been picking our shoes up off the floor the past couple of years — it’s our time.”

That sentiment – that operators have an opportunity in front of them that they must seize – is driving Belter-Chesser forward in 2025 as she plans the company’s next chapter. That follows some sweeping changes in 2024 to its operating portfolio and changes to its service model including the transition of 89 Holiday by Atria communities to other operators by Welltower (NYSE:WELL) and shutting its home care group to focus on its core senior living business.

When she ascended to the CEO role in early 2024, she equated the promotion to “putting on a new pair of glasses,” through which she could clearly see the company’s structure and path ahead. Belter-Chesser said in 2025 her proverbial glasses have the senior living demand boom led by the baby boomers in sight.

“We’ve got this demographic wave coming at us but we can’t get complacent because seniors have more choice now than ever before,” Belter-Chesser said.

Belter-Chesser said she’s learned more about Atria in the last 12 months than in her past 15 years with the company. Belter-Chesser said she’s reminded of a plaque in her office that has a simple equation on it that reads, “Atria is love plus math.”

“We’re on a mission for simplification, focusing on human-to-human connections,” Belter-Chesser said, with the goal set for the company’s corporate support team this year to give “hours back to the communities” so frontline staff can spend time with residents.

‘We don’t need change for change’s sake’

Underpinning Belter-Chesser’s philosophy is a belief that the senior living industry must change for the better if it hopes to meet the demand of the boomers. But that doesn’t mean changing just to do things differently.

Now is the time for senior living operators to look inward and deliver the services, amenities and communities that the incoming generation will actually want.

Last year, she visited 101 Atria communities, setting a new personal record. She did so to field new ideas for what’s potentially ahead in operations and growth.

Atria and its leaders are shaping their plans in 2025 around an acronym, CARE, which stands for: Customer experience improvements, Accountability in quality of operations, Results in bottom line improvement and Employee experience to improve retention.

This year, Atria communities organized their goals around the Net Promoter Score to better adapt sales and marketing tactics at a time in which the senior living consumer profile continues to change.

The company employs 12 quality enhancement directors with the company’s chief quality officer reporting directly to the Atria board of directors, which is intentionally kept “very separate” to provide accurate insights following biannual reviews.

Belter-Chesser said Atria will focus resources in emphasizing hospitality and brand standards across its multiple community lines. For assisted living, that is translating into a focus on care delivery infused with elements of hospitality within a resident’s daily experience.

Within its Holiday by Atria brand, Belter-Chesser said the segment was “showing some tremendous growth” in improving independent living and assisted living operations, given the context of the recent Welltower transition.

“It’s less about moving forward from the transition and more so about moving our business forward as we seek to deliver to all our stakeholders customers, families, employees, and owners,” Belter-Chesser said. “We’ve aligned our CARE operating framework in a way that keeps us focused on what we do well and what is important. That’s driving growth and occupancy by delivering our customers a quality product and our employees an engaging work environment.

She added that those improvements in customer experience, employee retention and ability to drive NOI and rate have also occurred across the company’s multiple brands of communities.

“We don’t need to reinvent anything, we just need to execute and that’s through our customers and our employees and making sure we deliver results,” Belter-Chesser said.

Following the transition from Welltower, the Holiday by Atria portfolio still stands at 100 communities. Belter-Chesser said new growth was “important and helpful” across the company’s multi-brand approach. What that future growth looks like remains to be seen, but Belter-Chesser said the current moment was “interesting” as Atria was fielding interest from groups both within and outside the senior living industry.

“It’s the traditional names but also people that haven’t been playing in seniors housing including outside investment,” Belter-Chesser said. “There’s real opportunities in our price points and markets where we’re highly clustered that make sense for us so we’re looking at those opportunities.”

Chances to grow regional density across its 28 states, she added, would be “sweet spots” for potential future growth of Atria as the company remains “scaled and scalable.”

To reach potential outside investment for groups looking to capitalize on the industry’s “golden age,” senior living operators and ownership entities have a responsibility, Belter-Chesser said, to educate those new to the space to create strong relationships with capital providers.

“But if you think you’re getting the demographic wave without understanding what the industry is, you’re doing both your capital providers and operating partners a disservice,” Belter-Chesser said.

In improving the bottom line, she noted that the industry may get “overly focused” on occupancy, rather than focusing on net operating income (NOI), and ways to increase revenue.

“We don’t need change for change’s sake, we need change that drives NOI that drives results,” Belter-Chesser added, referencing the need to simplify revenue management in senior living and glean other ideas from hospitality, airlines, retail and food service industries.

Belter-Chesser is always looking for new ideas to improve Atria’s customer service and hospitality, occasionally ordering room service from different hotels to gauge customer relationship management from the hospitality sector.

“I think about what the call is like, how the call makes me feel and so I think about how we can apply that to what we do,” she said. “They have a point of view, they have a perspective, they have an experience that we could learn from that will make us better as an industry.”

Combatting operational challenges

To improve retention, Atria launched a survey tool for new staff with a question asking how long staff plan to stay with the company, with human resources leaders identifying the first-year of employment and getting an employee to that mark as the most critical time period, Belter-Chesser said.

To get there, Belter-Chesser said Atria is focused on creating career pathways for its new employees to show them a roadmap of what’s ahead on the senior living career ladder, known as “Atria Journeys.”

That’s broken up into four distinct areas: onboarding and operations training, leadership development, mentoring and rewards for hitting tenure benchmarks. In 2024, Atria spent $5 million on bonuses for retention in getting to one-year of employment, according to Belter-Chesser.

This focus on staffing comes as Belter-Chesser sees the senior living industry in a better position today to improve the bottom line since certain challenges in operations have moderated and the industry is not “fighting on as many fronts.”

“There’s less pressure in certain places,” Belter-Chesser said of the current operating environment, but noting realistically there were still challenges in staffing and care delivery that vary by market.

Improving staffing, Belter-Chesser said, will be the gateway to improving further bottom line performance and substantially capitalizing on future demand led by the boomers. As of 2025 that is already being felt across Atria’s various brand lines from market-rate to luxury brands.

Accessing new consumers, outlook

The senior living customer continues to change, Belter-Chesser said, as operators pivot to the boomers and even Gen X, to prepare operations to capitalize on demographic-driven demand.

That was coupled with Atria looking inward at its existing portfolios to determine physical plant upgrades, a common refrain in the industry as development on the whole largely remains muted. Those upgrades for Atria included changing unit mixes and improving common spaces along with resident rooms to meet current demands by prospects and residents.

With efforts underway on multiple fronts to improve operations, Belter-Chesser is cautiously optimistic about what’s ahead for the company in 2025 and the broader industry as a whole.

“I’m encouraged by all the innovation and change that’s happening within the industry and I think outside perspectives coming into senior living can bring a lot to the table,” Belter-Chesser said.

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