The senior living industry is undergoing a margin reset, and Frontier Senior Living CEO Greg Roderick sees a fresh opportunity to analyze and trim expenses across the company’s balance sheet.
Roderick is not shy about advocating for the value of senior living communities and the need to match care levels with revenue. And to that end, he is still optimistic about operators’ ability to raise resident rates in the months and years ahead.
But he also sees a new reality for senior living operators where expenses just aren’t decreasing, necessitating an even closer look at dollars and cents to maintain and grow average net operating income (NOI) margins. That is why in 2025 he is leaving no stone unturned regarding operational costs.
From joining group purchasing organizations to tweaking discounts doled out in sales, Roderick and Frontier’s other leaders have in recent years sought to make the company’s community budgets more efficient for that new reality. Thanks to that approach, they are much closer to that outcome today.
“You have to either peel off certain expensive line items at the risk of becoming less attractive as an employer and as a place to live for seniors, or you need to raise your revenue in some fashion,” Roderick told Senior Housing News.
Frontier also has forged new value-based care arrangements meant to increase length of stay and that save money on transportation along with new staffing processes that have meaningfully reduced turnover.
Dallas, Texas-based Frontier has grown to 45 communities in 2025, and today the company’s strategy includes expanding into certain smaller markets, including Green Valley, Arizona, located south of Tucson; and Garland, Texas, near the Dallas metropolitan area.
Looking ahead, Roderick is optimistic that lending – the lack of which represents one of the biggest current roadblocks to new senior living development – will soon unthaw, which he hopes will make obtaining construction financing for new projects easier.
No stone left unturned
From dining to utility costs, Roderick is “flipping stones” across the company’s operations to bring costs down across the company’s profit and loss (P&L) statement. For example, the company about two years ago stopped using styrofoam containers in its communities, reducing garbage costs, according to Roderick. In the time since, Frontier has saved around $1 million from that move alone.
It also is cutting back on marketing and advertising costs.
“A lot of those costs have contracted in general with competition,” he said. “Our social media has become much more profound, and frankly, I think we’re getting a lot more play out of that and that’s essentially free.”
“It’s extremely comprehensive, but we want to make sure that career path [keeps] them in our industry, rather than coming in and not really getting the quality training and time that they need,” Roderick said. “We want to try to keep people in this space as long as possible.”
Frontier also has enhanced how it awards its associates for good performance. The company doles out pay increases ranging from 25 cents to $1 per hour, based on regular performance evaluations, and it also has created more career paths for workers to advance within the company.
Frontier has reduced turnover by 80% in the last five years using that approach, Roderick said.
Training is another big priority. In the first four months of 2025, Frontier conducted 151 training sessions, largely held online over Microsoft Teams and sometimes as short as 10 minutes. Roderick also personally leads a weekly training meeting for the company’s sales teams, an approach he said has led to a closing rate of about 50% from tour to move-in and and a 40% closing rate for phone inquiries to tours.
Frontier has also partnered with Curana Health to offer more value-based care services. By building “a whole network” of bringing in healthcare providers, such as nurse practitioners, podiatrists, nutritionists and pharmacists. Frontier has reduced move outs, hospitalizations and re-hospitalizations, bolstering the amount of time residents stay in the community and cutting down on resident turnover.
In addition to bolstering revenue, that approach also has resulted in savings for Frontier. For example, the operator can coordinate care for residents currently living in the community without driving them to clinics or doctor’s offices, which helps cut transportation costs. And with fewer residents leaving their units to go to the hospital or elsewhere, Frontier also saves on marketing and advertising costs to acquire a new resident.
All of these represent “little moves” in the grand scheme of things, Roderick said. But they have all added up to a larger cost impact for Frontier. And Roderick is not done in that regard: In 2025, the company is exploring using AI to improve its processes and automate certain tasks so employees can spend more time with residents.
‘Rumbling’ of new development
New senior living development has effectively bottomed out in recent quarters as the cost of building remains higher than the cost of buying. To that end, cautious lenders haven’t financed new projects at nearly the rate they have in the past. But all that may be changing, Roderick said.
In 2025, he hears a “rumbling” in the form of lenders waking up from their long slumber. And he thinks that could allow the industry to begin getting new projects in the works within the next six to 12 months.
“Lending is finally coming back,” Roderick said. “There was a real contraction in lender interest in new construction. This year, there’s a lot of new interest, and a lot of dollars being set aside for it, which is wonderful.”
Part of his belief is born out of necessity. There are many older, obsolete properties on the market that cannot be converted to another product type due to outdated layouts and internal systems, and the industry will simply need to replace them with new communities in order to keep up with demand ahead.
Giving him confidence of that outcome is the fact that a high level of demand has meant that new Frontier buildings lease up faster than other communities in the past, despite the fact that they are larger.
Construction times are also shortening, at least for the operator. On average, new Frontier builds are typically full between 11 and 18 months, he said. Prior builds took a minimum of three years to fill.
“Nowadays, we’re finding that break even is eight or 10 months,” Roderick said. “They’re nice, beautiful [buildings]. The guy that’s got a 30 year old building three to four blocks away is sweating out.”
