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In 2020, senior living operator Cogir had about a dozen communities in the U.S. Five years and one merger later, the company is nearing the 100-community mark with its next chapter of growth in sight.
To Cogir USA CEO David Eskenazy, the senior living arm of Montreal-based Cogir Real Estate is not embarking on a radical new direction or era in 2025. Instead, the operator is making good on the growth and improvement plans its executive team has laid out in the last few years.
“It’s been about as smooth of an evolution as I would have imagined,” Eskenazy told Senior Housing News. “It’s one of those things where, if you had to do it all over again … I don’t think there’s a whole lot we would have done differently.”
In addition to Cogir’s U.S. holdings totaling about 11,000 units, the company now has more than 200 communities under management in Canada.
As it has grown in the U.S. and in Canada, Cogir has worked closely with its various ownership partners, which today include Welltower (NYSE: WELL), Harrison Street, PGIM, American Healthcare REIT (NYSE: AHR) and Fortress Investment Group.
The operator also spent the last few years staffing up and bolstering its org chart, including by adding leaders of key divisions such as head of facilities, sales and marketing and human resources. The company hired Gottfried Ernst as COO in late 2023.
All of that has helped advance a culture of “excellence” within the company, Eskenazy said. The company’s communities with occupancy above 90% doubled in 2024 over 2023, and in 2025 he expects the operator will continue to execute and grow accordingly.
“We never get complacent. We believe we have to prove ourselves again every single day,” Eskenazy said. “Whatever worked yesterday isn’t necessarily going to work tomorrow.”
‘Preparing for excellence’ in sales, operations
No doubt, Cogir’s U.S. expansion in the last few years has necessitated building out the company to take on more communities and services. But what has driven the company forward in recent years has been its pursuit of better standards, not a larger footprint.
“We actually weren’t preparing for growth so much as we were preparing for excellence,” Eskenazy said. “We didn’t perceive we had a dire need to grow. We perceived we had a dire need to be the best we could possibly be as an operator.”
For Cogir, that was a process that starts with sales. The company takes a laser-focus on speed-to-lead, seeking to follow up with prospects within minutes or hours, not days. Cogir’s Canadian and U.S. teams routinely collaborate and share practices to that end.
“You only have one opportunity for a first impression, and sometimes the first impression actually comes before a prospect visits the community,” Eskenazy said. “Let’s get back to them quickly, and let’s get back to them graciously.”
Thanks to those efforts, Eskenazy said Cogir is hitting its marks with regard to its sales numbers. And that is in the face of “more concessions in the last three or four years than I’ve ever seen,” he added.
“The disciplines around the sales process are critical, because occupancy and revenue growth are paramount,” he said.
Looking ahead, Eskenazy believes the company will grow to the 100-community mark some time in the first quarter of the year. He sees ownership groups shuffling their stable of operating partners or acquiring communities as two avenues for Cogir’s U.S. expansion ahead.
That’s not to say the company isn’t looking at development, he added. In fact, the operator is right now collaborating with its Canadian team on some U.S. development opportunities. That said, the math required to make new construction projects pencil out is still prohibitively hard, and Eskenazy is unsure whether the operator will notch any such projects in the year ahead given those challenges.
As the company grows, especially via new development, it will seek to iterate on its standard design. Built with high ceilings and materials including wood and stone, communities like Cogir’s Acoya Shea property in Scottsdale, Arizona, exemplify the operator’s next generation of architecture and design concepts.
“We try to take all those elements of design and create a new mold, and from that, see if we can take those features and re-stamp them,” he said.
He also sees debt issues and mortgages that “still have yet to run their course in terms of either being replaced or refinanced, or communities trading hands.” That, too, could present new opportunities for growth.
Leading with ‘human touch’
As it has grown, Cogir has emphasized the “human touch” of its leadership and staff, he added. After the merger with Cadence, the company moved its back-office presence to just one office in Scottsdale, a decision that Eskenazy said has helped create a more cohesive corporate team.
As it did so, the company also altered its regional org chart so that its regional directors oversee between six and eight communities, a slightly smaller focus than the typical 20-community operating regions some other operators prefer. That allows Cogir’s U.S. regionals to be more present and give more “eyeball-to-eyeball” support to executive directors.
“The executive director role is the most difficult job I have ever seen in any industry,” Eskenazy said. “We really want to have support come in a very human way, up and down the chain.”
Just as it has worked to support its employees, Cogir U.S. also receives support from its larger Canadian company, including from CEO Mathieu Duguay and leaders of its various service lines, which include senior housing, multifamily and commercial real estate.
At the end of the day, all of the company’s recent trials and tribulations have Eskenazy feeling optimistic about what comes next. He sees the lack of influx of newly built communities as an important breather for occupancy gains in the coming months and years, and sees “the light at the end of the tunnel” with regard to supply and demand.
There will likely be some curveballs along the way in the form of labor challenges and other operational headwinds along the way. But Eskenazy feels confident that the underlying business fundamentals of senior living are resilient.
“The basics of supply and demand seem like they’re in our favor, and those are things that aren’t quite as susceptible to unexpected shifts,” he said.
