Why Data, Business Intelligence Are Cornerstones Of Senior Living Operations In 2025

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Senior living companies are evolving their operating models to increasingly use new technology and real-time data to make better decisions. In 2025, the gap between companies with these capabilities and those without is widening.

Earlier this week, I attended the Senior Living 100 Leadership Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, where I talked with several providers actively using new tech platforms into their operating models. In the last three years, some of the largest owners and operators in the industry have overhauled their operational playbooks with new data analysis and intelligence tools to adjust rental rates, track and trim expenses and assess new residents with surgical precision.

In 2025, senior living operators are using tech and data platforms in new ways, such as pulling real-time data and analytics to guide care coordination and building systems to improve staff efficiency.

As they do so, they are reaping the benefits in the form of better sales and marketing methods, occupancy levels, resident care – and ultimately improved margins.

“Frankly, if you’re not technology-based, you will be shortly,” Juniper Communities CEO Lynne Katzmann said. “Mindset is the most important thing we can work on, and it’s also the most difficult.”

Katzmann believes that adopting new mindsets with regard to technology is the most important — and difficult — task for operators.

Sales and marketing is another front for senior living tech and data deployment. The incoming baby boomer generation is more tech-savvy and communicates in different ways than their predecessors, and that will require a new approach to reach them than in the past, senior living operators have long told me.

That sentiment is growing among senior living executives, including Sonida Senior Living CEO Brandon Ribar, who sees a need to get “ahead of the game” relative to the company’s competitors by using sales data to pinpoint new prospects and market to them online with pinpoint accuracy.

“We all get served ads every day,” Ribar said. “We’re not quite there in senior living, but more and more we can tailor our offering to when people are searching for things in our space.” 

As I wrote last May, I believe data will differentiate good from great senior living operators. In the last year, senior living companies have iterated on their already forward-thinking processes, and I believe these examples should be a wake-up call for operators in the space that have not yet adopted new tech and data platforms. While there is still time for companies to power their operations with new analytics capabilities, I sense that the clock is ticking for others to follow suit or find themselves at a potential disadvantage in the years ahead as their competitors get more and more sophisticated.

In this week’s members-only SHN+ Update, I reflect on my conversations regarding data and operations at SL100 and offer the following takeaways:

– How data is becoming a must-have for marketing and care coordination efforts

– Why data will be a crucial tool in the industry’s effort to grow occupancy and margins

How data powers better operations

One of the driving forces behind the industry’s recent push into data analytics have been REITs Welltower (NYSE: WELL) and Ventas (NYSE: VTR). Both have built their operating partners with proprietary systems capable of tracking various aspects of operations, from sales and marketing to resident care. Those capabilities are helping expand their senior housing operating portfolios and aiding their operating partners to make better decisions on the ground.

Operators are also building up their in-house data capabilities at the same time. They include New York City-based Trustwell Living, which has doubled down on data analytics in the last year; Wichita, Kansas-based Legend Senior Living, which is rolling out a new business intelligence reporting tool in 2025; and Des Monies-Iowa-based LCS, which in 2024 launched a new data science effort with in-house data scientists.

It’s no surprise to me that companies with enhanced data analytics capabilities believe those efforts are worth doing, given how much they usually invest in them. But I also can see the impact of those strategies in improving operating fundamentals. For example, Trustwell Living has in the last year built a platform that tracks data points such as occupancy, resident rates, revenue per occupied room, expenses, staff hours, time spent on tasks and lead volume.

Cohen told SHN that the company’s data-forward approach helped grow occupancy in a five-community turnaround portfolio by 12 percentage points last year.

“It’s a way that we can make sure that we’re always improving our processes to be the most efficient and the best-in-class in all aspects,” Cohen said during a recent appearance on SHN+ TALKS.

Although that’s just one relatively small example, Trustwell isn’t alone in seeing those kinds of results.

Dallas, Texas-based Sonida is spending as much as 30% more on technology in 2025 to make better operational decisions. Ribar has noted that the company’s tech push would be limited to “things that truly have an operational impact, or that really help our residents,” such as a monitoring AI program that has reduced its response times for a resident fall to around two minutes. The company also has used data from in-house leads and move-ins to inform marketing decisions as it has moved away from relying as much on its large national referral partners.

These efforts, Ribar said, position Sonida to be “far ahead of where the industry has been historically.”

Juniper uses its data to power and inform its care coordination efforts. The company collects information such as health and activity data to build a “prescriptive lifestyle prescription” for each resident, Katzmann told me.

“We want to help residents understand what they need to do to stay healthy,” Katzmann added.

One way that Juniper is seeing data improve operations is through community engagement, with more residents apt to using voice-assisted technology in coordinating daily activities as language recognition and AI-supported large language models are “changing dramatically,” she added.

I think all of this is leading to a world where some operators are simply better equipped to meet the wants and needs of the boomers. Although operators can surely market their services and coordinate care for residents without data sophistication, they just won’t have the same visibility to benchmark the impact of their decisions.

I think the risk ahead is that senior living companies either fail to reinvest in better data processes and fall behind in the years ahead, or that they fall victim to tech amounting to “snake oil” along the way. The good news to me is that, based on what I saw and heard at Senior Living 100, operators are just getting started in these efforts, with more to come down the road.

Fine-tuning operations for better margins

Senior living operators and owners have a tough task ahead in 2025.

Although occupancy is generally on the upswing, a new floor for expenses, ever-present staffing challenges and constant unit turnover are making maintaining and growing margins harder. I think getting a better handle on data collection and analysis is paramount if operators want to further these efforts this year. That is underscored by how many senior living operating models now rely on acting upon real-time data.

One way to get better margins is to make sure staffing hours correlate to care services, but therein lies a delicate balance. Too many workers on the clock could blow up delicate staffing budgets, while too few could harm quality of care.

Arrow Senior Living uses its proprietary Archer platform to merge scheduling, communication, budgeting and EHR data into one place in order to drive better, more fine-tuned results.

“This provides real-time, minute-by-minute data and helps identify variances or outliers in care,” Harris told me. “If we could start to look at ways to meet people a little sooner in the [senior living] process, that is all adding value to the bottom line.”

Denver, Colorado-based Ascent Living Communities swapped out 12 tech platforms used in operations in order to allow data to flow into a “data lake” that parses out real-time figures on community performance, co-founders Susie Finely and Tom Finley told me while at SL100. The result has helped some communities in its managed portfolio to reach margins “touching 40%,” and directly impacted margin improvement by 7.5% in 2024.

“The data we’re giving our teams is between 30 minutes and 23 hours old,” Tom Finley told me. “It’s a very different way to look at the business.”

Cohen spent decades studying financial P&Ls in the senior living industry, and he has come away with a belief that the only way to sustainably grow margins is to take a surgical approach to operations. The company collects data on resident assessments and staff hours and ensures they are exactly in sync – and it’s the “little things that make a difference,” he said.

“What we’re trying to understand is how we can use and create real-life information to allow us to better staff our communities effectively and also drive the revenues for the care that we’re driving,” Cohen said. “It’s not coming out of the box from one of the systems that provide a solution to senior housing. You have to create that, it’s bespoke.”

As Cohen noted, these are often systems that operators must build, not buy. And whether they choose to partner with a larger partner that has already built such a platform or go it alone, to me the bottom line is that senior living must be moving fast now to create tools for success tomorrow.

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