How New City Financial underwrites senior housing and assisted living financing
Senior housing is a needs-based, operationally intensive asset class, and it finances differently from a plain lease-up building because the income comes from resident fees and care revenue rather than a handful of long-term commercial leases. New City Financial qualifies these loans on the community's own economics instead of your personal income, so we begin with the property's net operating income and its debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR) rather than your tax returns. Deals that clear a 1.0 DSCR or better, supported by credible in-place or projected resident income, are our core business. That cash-flow-first approach is what lets a self-employed owner, a partnership, or an LLC close on an assisted living community without the multi-year income documentation a conventional bank demands.
On terms, we lend up to 75% of value, on loan amounts from $75,000 to $50 million, with a 500 FICO floor and closings in under three weeks when title and third-party reports cooperate. Fixed-rate structures over 3, 8, and 30 years — with no balloon payments — give owners a predictable debt cost to underwrite against, which matters when census ramp-up and staffing budgets are still stabilizing. We lend across 40+ states. Any rates shown on this site are illustrative; your actual pricing depends on the asset, the market, your leverage, and operator experience.
Senior housing and assisted living deals we finance
We finance a broad slice of this market: independent living communities, assisted living facilities, memory-care residences, and combined campuses that blend multiple levels of care under one roof. Because revenue is driven by census and per-resident rates rather than one tenant's credit, we weigh occupancy trends, resident and payer mix, and the strength of the operating platform heavily in underwriting. Value-add plays are welcome — acquiring an under-occupied or dated community, refreshing resident units and common areas, and rebuilding census to lift NOI is exactly the kind of business plan our financing is built for. Owner-occupied commercial, where your operating company runs the community it owns, is eligible as a business-purpose loan.
Because every loan is business-purpose, we do not finance primary residences, and as a commercial lending firm we work with investors and operators rather than consumer homebuyers. Common uses include acquisition, rate-and-term refinance to replace a maturing or higher-cost loan, and cash-out refinance to pull equity for the next acquisition or a capital-improvement budget. If you are weighing whether a specific community pencils, the fastest path is a short conversation about the census, the in-place NOI, and your business plan for the property.
Reading the numbers on a senior housing loan
The metric that moves a senior housing loan is coverage. We size to a debt-service coverage ratio, so a community that produces net operating income comfortably above its debt payments supports more proceeds than one running near break-even. Occupancy is the lever behind that coverage: a stabilized community with steady census and a durable resident base underwrites cleanly, while one recovering from a dip reads as a value-add story where projected income and a realistic lease-up assumption carry more weight. We also separate the real estate from the operating business and look at the trend in per-resident revenue and whether expenses reflect the true cost of care and staffing.
