Cadence Living and Flournoy Development Group broke ground in 2020. Cogir bought Cadence in 2022. The owner brought in Harbor Retirement Associates in 2025. Nobody explained any of it to the families living inside.
By: Ryan R. Miner
A family walks into a new senior living community. My family did it twice – except it was memory care for both of my grandmothers.
My grandmother Joyce, my dad’s mother – my lone surviving grandparent – resides in a Hagerstown, Maryland, memory care community. My grandmother, Maureen, passed away under hospice care in a Boonsboro, Maryland, memory care community a little over a year ago.
A wide lobby that smells like a fresh, fancy four-star hotel? Right? That smell – we all want to know what that smell is! Then the family sees a wraparound fireplace, maybe a sleek coffee bar with stainless steel appliances, a wall of windows facing a preserve. Someone warm hands the family a folder and offers a guided tour.
That family reads the name on the sign as a promise. The name means a company stands behind this building. And it means somebody is accountable. It means that if something goes wrong in two years, a “they” exists to call.
I want to walk readers through a Montgomery County, Maryland-based senior living community’s five-year journey and translate every change along the way. The ordinary machinery of this industry ran through a difficult stretch, and the families and staff inside absorbed all of it without an explanation.
The building sits at 17001 Georgia Avenue in Olney, Maryland.
If you work with older adults in Montgomery County, you’ve likely interfaced with one of the six or so executive directors within the last five years. Or you might have talked to one of the seven or eight resident directors of care services.
Part One: The four parties behind every senior living community
Senior living borrowed its structure from the hotel business.
When you stay at a Marriott, Marriott usually doesn’t own that building. A real estate investor owns it. Marriott holds a contract to run it, put its name on it, and Marriott collects a fee. If the owner decides Marriott underperformed, the owner can end that contract and hire someone else.
Senior living works pretty much the same way.
- The developer builds the building. Many developers never intend to hold it. They build, they open, they sell, they move to the next site. The industry calls this a merchant developer; it describes an ordinary business rather than a warning sign.
- The owner holds the real estate. Frequently, a pension fund, a private equity fund, a real estate investment trust, or a joint venture of several investors. The owner holds the decision-making power. And the owners’ name? They rarely, if ever, appear anywhere in your tour folder.
- The operator is the management company. It’s the name on the sign, the shirts, the brochures. The operator runs the building under a contract with the owner and collects a management fee calculated on revenue. The operator is a contractor – a consequential one.
- The executive director runs the building day to day. Your main human being who knows your grandmother’s name and whether she’s eating (they should).
The name on the sign belongs to a company the owner hired. The owner can replace that company under the terms of their contract. And the executive director sits at the bottom of that chain, holding the least power and the most accountability.
Those four roles explain the entire timeline that follows.
Part Two: What happened at 17001 Georgia Avenue, year by year
September 2020: two out-of-state companies break ground
Cadence Living and Flournoy Development Group broke ground on a 107-apartment community on 37 acres, including 31 acres of forest preserve.
A three-story building for independent living and assisted living with an attached two-story memory care community. The two firms announced it as a joint venture, meaning they partnered on the money and shared the risk.
Flournoy operates out of Columbus, Georgia. Cadence operated out of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Neither company is local to Maryland. That’s normal. National developers chase suburbs like Olney because land is scarce, zoning is difficult, and approvals take years. The industry calls these high-barrier markets. The difficulty is the attraction, since it keeps competitors out once you open.
2022: the doors open with 129 apartments
The community came to market offering 129 apartments across independent living, assisted living, and memory care.
The apartment count rose from 107 at groundbreaking to 129 at opening because designs get reconfigured during construction.
The count carries no meaning. The opening date carries a great deal, and Part Three explains why.
November 2022: Cogir buys the management company
Sacramento-based Cogir Management acquired Scottsdale-based Cadence Living.
The combined company oversaw close to 8,000 apartments across 60 communities in nine states, placing it among the 25 largest operators in the country.
Cogir bought out Cadence’s shareholders. Every community kept its existing name. Cogir Management USA operates as the American arm of Montreal-based Cogir.
Nothing happened to the building. Two companies merged one layer above the property. Think of it like two accounting firms merging without a single audit engagement changing hands. The real estate did not move. Resident agreements didn’t necessarily change.
That’s why the sign still read Cadence at Olney for the longest time.
From the sidewalk, nothing occurred. But underneath? The company employing everyone in that building had been absorbed into the American subsidiary of a Canadian real estate firm.
Was there a warning sign?
No – operator consolidation runs constantly.
Small and midsize management companies merge upward because scale lowers their cost of insurance, software, purchasing, and recruiting. If your parent or grandparent lives in a senior living community run by a company with fewer than 40 buildings, there’s a real chance that the company changes hands during your loved one’s stay.
The “Dear John” letter. It happens – and it happens quickly.
Or the company could sell the building off entirely and force you to leave.
Remember The Landing in Silver Spring? All residents had to be out by November 15, 2023.
Do you want to guess who absorbed most of The Landing’s residents at a special discount rate? The same building that sits at 17001 Georgia Avenue.
April 15, 2025: the owner replaces the operator
Harbor Retirement Associates announced that it had assumed management of Cadence at Olney and rebranded the community HarborChase of Olney, the 19th HarborChase community at the time in its portfolio.
Senior Housing News covered the transaction as a management acquisition rather than a real estate sale. HRA’s own announcement carries a phrase worth noticing, describing the community as a Cogir property.
“Management acquisition” is industry language for a change of operator initiated by the owner. One management contract ended, and another began. The flag came down, and a different flag went up. The building didn’t sell. Residents didn’t move out in hordes. The physical plant is identical.
But the uniforms, the dining program, the activity calendar, the software, the email addresses, and a meaningful share of the leadership all changed.
And another executive director.
Replacing an operating & management agreement
An owner’s right to replace an operator lives in the management agreement rather than in any automatic industry rule.
Law firm analyses of senior housing management agreements show these contracts typically permit termination for default, for uncured breach, for fraud or insolvency, for failure to hit negotiated performance tests, and sometimes for the owner’s convenience with notice and a fee.
Owners also change operators after their own ownership changes – during portfolio restructuring and through exits both sides want. Cogir grew from roughly 8,000 units at the Cadence deal in 2022 to about 11,000 by late 2025 and roughly 13,000 by April 2026. The company signed 25 new management contracts in 2024, acquired Epoch Senior Living’s 16-community management platform in November 2025, and announced plans to restart US development and expand from 17 states toward as many as 24.
Cogir also still operates Cogir of Potomac, about 15 miles from Olney in the same D.C. suburb.
An operator change tells you far less about the operator than people assume
Cogir shed this building while adding roughly 5,000 apartments elsewhere.
Whatever happened at the Olney community belongs to this specific asset, this owner, and this deal. Families and industry people alike read a new sign as a verdict on the outgoing company. But I would argue the reading is unreliable.
Four corporate entities touched that building in under five years. A family touring in 2021 and a family touring in 2025 walked into the same lobby and met two entirely different companies.
Part Three: Why the building’s economics broke, and why slow lease-up was not the cause
I want to be precise here: the intuitive version of this story is wrong, and I nearly published it a while back.
I sat on this research for a while. Last week, I took a trip to SoCal (came home Monday, in fact). I had a conversation with an older adult on the sidewalk of Esplende in Redondo Beach about senior living. The conversation motivated me. After we talked business, we admired the Pacific Ocean and complained about how expensive senior living is.
A community that opened in 2022 filled slowly because families were still frightened of congregate settings?
But the data doesn’t support that conclusion.
NIC’s longitudinal lease-up analysis found that communities opening in 2021 and 2022 leased up at roughly the pace of the pre-2018 era; it projects the 2022 and 2023 cohorts stabilize faster than earlier ones. The cohort that genuinely stalled opened in 2020. More than half of those buildings had never crossed 80% occupancy as of that analysis.
The demand side wasn’t the problem. It was the cost and the financing side that caused the heartburn.
Lease-up runs longer than most families imagine
A new senior living community may open empty and fill over years rather than months. NIC’s work describes an S-curve where occupancy accelerates in the second year. Properties generally stabilize in their third or fourth year after opening. Throughout that stretch, the building loses money by design. The investors funded it knowing that.
This plan is called a pro forma
It’s the spreadsheet the owner and lender agreed on before a shovel touched dirt: this many move-ins per month, at this rent, with this payroll, breaking even in this month. Every decision inside the building for the first several years gets measured against that spreadsheet.
Payroll is the largest line item by a wide margin
In Ziegler’s 2026 survey of senior living and care organizations, employee compensation accounted for 56.2% of operating budgets.
That survey covers organizations rather than individual properties and skews toward not-for-profit full-continuum providers. Treat it as a benchmark rather than a national property-level audit. The direction holds regardless.
Staffing costs ran hot, and they have not cooled the way the trade press implies
During the crisis, 89% of respondents to a NIC executive survey reported using agency or temporary staff.
The best-quantified premium comes from skilled nursing rather than senior living, where federal analysts found contract nursing labor cost 75% more per hour than facility-employed staff in 2021, against a pre-pandemic premium of 45 to 60%.
The retreat narrative also doesn’t hold.
In Ziegler’s 2026 survey, the share of senior living organizations saying they often use agency staffing rose from 16.8% to 24.8% year over year, while the share saying they never use it fell.
Interest rates climbed against a loan that had to be refinanced
Construction loans ran short.
Buildings that broke ground in 2020 borrowed near zero and went looking for permanent financing in 2023 and 2024, when rates had climbed sharply. The exit financing everyone assumed would be waiting turned hostile.
A building can miss its numbers without a single person inside it doing anything wrong. Payroll inflation and a refinancing that costs more than the model assumed will do it alone. The staff greeting families in that lobby every morning had no hand in interest rates, wage markets, or a spreadsheet written in 2019.
Everything that follows in this analysis rests on that point.
Part Four: Why executive directors get replaced first
What follows is my own analysis, drawn from over a decade working in healthcare and senior services rather than from any published dataset. To my knowledge, there’s no public source that quantifies executive director turnover across this industry.
The executive director answers for census, labor cost, clinical outcomes, survey results, and family satisfaction. The executive director controls almost none of the inputs. Rent pricing sits above them. Capital improvements sit above them. The marketing budget sits above them. Hiring authority frequently comes capped.
When a building misses its pro forma, replacing the executive director is the least expensive lever within reach. Firing a director likely costs a severance and a search. Cutting rents damages the underwriting. Renovating requires capital. So the cheap lever gets pulled.
The new director then needs six to nine months to learn the building, the staff, the state regulators, and the local referral network. Census stalls during that ramp. The numbers worsen. The director gets replaced. Every executive director turnover can wreak significant harm on a community that those on the outside may not fully recognize or appreciate.
But what about those paid referrals like A Place for Mom & the others?
Washington Post reporting built on bankruptcy court records put A Place for Mom’s fee at roughly the equivalent of one month’s charges for a successful placement.
Testimony before the Maryland General Assembly on a referral transparency bill described agencies receiving 75% to more than 115% of one month’s rent, care level, and services. Those fees contract by contract rather than off a published national rate card. You could read the range as a reported practice rather than a fixed price.
A community under census pressure therefore hands a month of each new resident’s rent to a website, out of a margin that was already short, which puts more pressure on the next director.
And a building cycling through executive directors doesn’t necessarily have a hiring problem. It may have economics set by its opening date and an owner reaching for the lever that costs the least, until the owner concludes the problem was never the director and replaces the operating company instead.
Part Five: Why sales and care staff cannot explain the ownership structure
This part will sting for people I like and respect, so I want to be fair about it.
- Walk into one of these buildings and ask the sales director who owns the real estate. In my experience, most cannot tell you.
- Ask how long the current operator has held the management agreement, and most do not know the agreement exists.
- Ask what the building’s stabilized occupancy target is, and you get a warm non-answer.
Training explains this, not character.
Sales training in senior living mostly covers the product, not the capital structure
New sales staff mostly learn floor plans, care levels, pricing tiers, the dining program, objection handling, and the emotional stages a family moves through. They learn to build trust, which matters enormously and which many of them do beautifully.
But are these sales directors taught what a pro forma is, how to read it, who signs the management agreement, or why the owner might replace their employer next spring? The last time I asked that question in 2022 when I briefly worked for Cadence Senior Living – in full disclosure – I was basically told to mind my own business.
Clinical staff receive even less education
A wellness director learns regulations, care plans, and documentation.
Who hands the all-star nursing director the ownership chart and asks them to explain the business of the business to a family taking a tour?
The operator’s brand
The operator’s brand exists to feel like the whole company. That is the brand’s job.
A sales director who works for a national operator honestly experiences the operator as the company, because the operator signs the paycheck, sets policy, and runs training. The owner is an entity in another state sending asset managers to quarterly meetings the sales director does not attend.
The incentives point elsewhere
A sales director gets measured on move-ins this month. Understanding the capital structure produces no move-ins.
Nobody rewards learning this critical content.
Why is that?
Why do so many senior living companies fail to teach their staff how their business makes money?
Part Six: Senior housing occupancy, construction, and rents in August 2026
The arc that began at Olney in 2020 has turned.
Every figure below carries its reporting date – because in this sector, a two-quarter lag changes the story.
Occupancy has climbed back and kept climbing
Senior housing occupancy reached 89.9% in the second quarter of 2026 across NIC MAP’s 31 primary markets, up 40 basis points from the first quarter, with half of those markets now above 90%. That marked the twentieth consecutive quarter of occupancy gains.
Independent living stood at 91.3% and assisted living at 88.4%. Baltimore came in at 91.8%, among the highest of those 31 markets. No public source breaks out the Washington metro or the Maryland suburbs. I’m not going to invent a number for Montgomery County.
For scale, occupancy in those same markets bottomed at 78.0% in the second quarter of 2021.
New construction has collapsed
Fewer than 16,000 units were under construction in the second quarter of 2026.
NIC reported the first-quarter figure as the lowest since 2012. Annual inventory growth ran 0.4% – a fifth consecutive quarter below one percent and near the low of the series. JLL, using NIC MAP data through the fourth quarter of 2025, put construction starts in primary markets 77% below their late-2021 peak. CBRE’s mid-2026 development cost survey helps explain why.
Development now costs an average of $388,830 per revenue unit.
Demand keeps building
The oldest baby boomers turned 80 in 2025 and 2026. NIC attributes the current occupancy gains to net absorption outpacing the new units being delivered.
What does that mean?
Fewer choices. Buildings with empty apartments in 2022 likely have waiting lists in 2026. The senior living community you want now may not have the apartment you need in the month you need it.
Higher rents. Asking rents grew 4.6% year over year as of the second quarter of 2026. Full buildings mostly don’t discount.
Operator changes will keep happening
No published source tracks how often management contracts turn over across the industry. Believe me, I looked for months.
If you’ve found this data, could you please share it with me?
I would expect sign changes to continue in a strong market. Whatever happened at Olney between 2022 and 2025 happened during the hardest stretch this industry has had in decades.
The same stretch played out at hundreds of addresses. Who told the families?
Part Seven: What the public record doesn’t show about who owns the Olney building
I couldn’t establish who owns the Olney real estate today: whether Flournoy sold its position, when, or for what price – from land records portals, not from SEC filings, not from trade coverage.
The shape of that gap matters, so here is what the search produced:
- No public source identifies the fee-simple owner.
- No announcement, recorded conveyance, or database result documents a transfer by Flournoy.
- No source confirms or rules out an institutional equity partner such as Harrison Street, which has backed other Flournoy and Cadence projects.
- No filing ties this address to any publicly traded healthcare REIT, though absence in a keyword search proves nothing, since REITs report property schedules under internal names and through portfolio entities.
- No recorded construction loan, lender, or refinancing surfaced.
Two complications I must mention
A sale of membership interests in the owning entity would transfer economic ownership without generating a deed; a clean title search can miss it entirely.
And HRA’s announcement calling the community a Cogir property suggests Cogir may have held an equity position rather than a management contract alone.
(Deeds and mortgages are public.)
Montgomery County land records and the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation will show the chain of title, every transfer, every recorded price, every lender, and every recorded loan amount. The Circuit Court’s land records office in Rockville has public terminals.
That is the reporting I am doing next; I’ll publish what the record shows as soon as I have the information in hand and have taken a close look at it.
Part Eight: How Does Senior Living Make Money? Who & What Gets Paid?
Families may ask whether a prospective senior living community is profitable. The more useful question is who gets paid, and when.
Most of the money in a senior living community changes hands before anyone knows whether the building works.
What follows describes how money moves through a building of this type, using published industry averages rather than Olney’s books. This ownership is private and files nothing. I encourage you to read every figure below as illustration.
Paid regardless of outcome
- The land seller. Cashed out in 2020 and likely never thought about the building again.
- The contractor and the architect. Paid on draws during construction, 2020 through 2022. Their work concluded before the first resident arrived.
- The developer. A development fee, customarily a percentage of total project cost in the mid single digits, earned across the construction period. CBRE’s mid-2026 survey put average senior housing development cost at $388,830 per revenue unit, which would price a 129-apartment building of this class somewhere around $50 million. Whatever the true figure at Olney, the development fee was earned by 2022, before lease-up began.
- The lender. Origination fees, then interest throughout. During lease-up, that interest frequently gets paid from an interest reserve funded inside the construction loan. The building borrows money to pay its lender while sitting mostly empty. Everyone plans it that way.
- The operator. Families rarely learn this part. Senior living management fees are calculated on gross revenue rather than on profit, and practitioners commonly describe them in the range of four to six percent. I couldn’t locate a published national benchmark for that range. The fee at Olney is set by an agreement that isn’t public. I encourage you to treat the percentage as industry convention rather than a verified figure. The structure is the point regardless.
- Apply JLL’s reported average monthly rent of $5,479 through the fourth quarter of 2025 to a 129-apartment building at 85 percent occupancy, and annual revenue lands somewhere near $7 million. A revenue-based fee on that figure runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and the operator collects it whether or not the building covers its debt service.
- The referral platforms. Roughly one month of a resident’s charges for each successful placement, per the bankruptcy court reporting cited above, with arrangements running from 75% to more than 115 percent of a month’s rent, care, and services. Every move-in sourced through a paid platform sends a month of that resident’s rent back out the door.
Paid only if something remains
The equity. The joint venture partners collect from whatever survives operating expenses, debt service, and fees, and they typically collect at sale or refinancing rather than year to year. Through a lease-up that ran into wage inflation and a refinancing market that turned hostile, whatever survived was plausibly negative for years.
Paid least, exposed most
The staff.
Wages, and the least security in the building. When the pro forma missed, the cheapest correction available ran straight through community staff.
The parties paid for activity got paid – but the party that paid for outcomes carried the loss. That ordering is not a scandal, and it is not unique to senior living, since it describes how nearly all commercial real estate works. It does explain something families find baffling.
A community can feel busy, well staffed, and beloved by its residents while losing money every month. The same community can change hands repeatedly without anything visible going wrong.
Is this Olney senior living building profitable today?
No public source can tell you; I’m not going to guess. Private ownership, no filings, no disclosure obligation.
However, the industry-level answer is clearer.
Buildings that survived 2022 through 2024 are performing now. Occupancy across NIC MAP’s primary markets reached 89.9% in the second quarter of 2026; half of those markets cleared 90%, and asking rents grew 4.6% year over year. A stabilized building in 2026 is a fundamentally different asset than a half-full building in 2023.
That timing produces the observation this whole piece has been circling. Cogir ran this community through the hardest stretch, absorbed the lease-up, and earned a fee calculated on revenue. HRA took over in April 2025 and inherited a maturing building entering the strongest market this industry has seen in a decade.
I am describing a structure rather than calling it unfair.
But it answers the question about who made money at Olney. The parties compensated for activity did fine, and the party compensated for outcomes bore the risk, which is exactly why the party bearing the risk is the one who changed the operator.
Part Nine: Five questions to ask on a senior living tour
Ask these warmly. The person answering is probably a good person who has never been asked.
- Who owns this building? Not who operates it but who precisely holds the real estate. If nobody on site knows, that answer is information.
- How long has the current management company held the contract here? Under two years means ask what preceded it.
- How long has the executive director been in that chair? And how many people held it before them in the last three years?
- How long have the care staff on my parent’s floor worked here? Tenure among the people who provide hands-on care tells you more about daily life than any amenity.
- What happens to my agreement if the operator changes? A real answer exists. Make them find it.
Every one of these questions is answerable; none of them is hostile.
Takeaway
The name on the sign belongs to the operator.
The operator answers to an owner you will probably never identify. The owner can replace the operator under terms neither of you will ever read. And when that happens, the staff who know your mother’s name absorb the volatility of a capital structure they never saw and were never taught.
You do not need to distrust senior living to know all that. You need it to advocate well inside it.
Sources
Property timeline
- Cadence Living and Flournoy Development Group announce the Olney community, Flournoy Development Group, September 2020
- Cogir Management acquisition of Cadence Living, announced November 2022, covered by McKnight’s Senior Living, Senior Housing News, Seniors Housing Business, and Real Estate News Exchange
- HRA assumes management of Cadence at Olney, Harbor Retirement Associates, April 15, 2025, and distributed through Argentum
- Senior Living Dealbook, Senior Housing News, April 22, 2025
Industry mechanics
- Lease-Up Trends Show First Year Critical, NIC, October 24, 2024
- Senior Housing Property Lease-Up is Taking Longer in Recent Years, NIC MAP Vision, January 23, 2025
- 2026 State of the Senior Living and Care Workforce, Ziegler, July 16, 2026
- The Use of Contract Staff in Nursing Homes Remains High, HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, January 2025
- Expense and Staffing Optimization for Senior Care and Living Operators, Provider Magazine, March 2023, reporting NIC’s January 2022 executive survey
- A Place for Mom referral fee reporting, The Washington Post, May 16, 2024
- Testimony on senior living referral service transparency, Maryland General Assembly, 2024, and related coverage in McKnight’s Senior Living
- Senior Housing Facility Management Agreements, Paul, Weiss, May 2014, and Senior Facilities: Operator Management Agreements, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, October 2018
- Joint Ventures Between Health Care Providers and REITs, Hall Render, September 2016
Operator scale and portfolio
- Cogir portfolio growth, US leadership change, and development restart, reported by Senior Housing News, April 2026
- Cogir acquisition of the Epoch Senior Living management platform, November 2025
- Cogir of Potomac, Cogir Senior Living
- Harbor Retirement Associates co-development and capital partnership announcements, 2018 through 2026
Market data
- Occupancy in Senior Housing Climbs as Half of Primary Markets Top 90, NIC, July 9, 2026, and accompanying analysis, July 20, 2026
- First quarter 2026 release, NIC, April 23, 2026
- 2Q22 Key Takeaways, NIC MAP, documenting the pandemic occupancy trough
- Seniors Housing and Care Investor Survey and Trends Outlook, JLL Research, March 11, 2026, with data through the fourth quarter of 2025
- 2026 Senior Housing Development Costs, CBRE, July 8, 2026
Not established
- Fee simple ownership of 17001 Georgia Avenue. Montgomery County land records and Maryland SDAT pending.
- Executive director tenure at this community. Maryland Office of Health Care Quality licensing file pending.
- The reason the owner replaced the operator in April 2025.
Hi, I’m Ryan! I write about senior living financing, how businesses actually make money, aging services, healthcare operations, public accountability, and more. I spent roughly a decade in healthcare and senior services before founding Sentinel Silver, LLC, and I’ve been the editor and founder of a Maryland news and politics media outlet for over 11 years. You can reach me at [email protected].
