Viva Senior Living Eyes Adding Up To 30 Communities In 2025 Growth Spurt

Viva Senior Living is on a fast growth pace in 2025, with plans to potentially bring on as many as 20 to 30 new communities this year alone.

The Norwood, NJ-based company, now at 33 communities in eight states, is seeking to do so via third-party management opportunities with ownership groups, according to Chief Operating Officer Chris Metternich.

“We’re looking at probably between 20 to 30 properties this year as our goal,” Metternich said. “We’re built out to maintain that now.”

The company’s portfolio is a mix of owned and managed properties at present across the Northeast and Southeast.

In 2024, Logos Living Capital acquired eight former Commonwealth Senior Living communities in a multi-state transaction and named Viva Senior Living as the operator. That move, coupled with the company’s busy 2024 campaign to shore up operations to scale, has primed it for future growth.

“We set the structure of the organization and we’re prepared in 2025 and we’re composed of five regions now,” Metternich said. “2025 is shaping up to be a transformational year for operations.”

The main areas of focus on operations include improving staff efficiency, quality of care and resident experience, while integrating new communities into the fold. This internal focus on operations comes as the company also has three senior living development projects underway at varying stages of development.

In integrating the former Commonwealth communities, Viva Senior Living has emphasized building out regional staff, improving training and standardizing operational protocols to ensure a smooth transition.

This growth will be fueled by capital investment from family offices and private investors active in the senior living industry, with an appetite to continue investment in 2025, Metternich noted.

“These groups are getting ready to deploy a significant amount of dry powder to the market [in 2025,],” Metternich said. “We’re preparing ourselves for that.”

The operator is aiming to increase its”cluster formation” of regional density within its existing markets of operation while maintaining a “slim” corporate structure, without a home office and an executive team that rotates through the company’s portfolio of managed and owned communities.

Metternich said Viva is most able to handle full-continuum properties with independent living, assisted living and memory care services. Where those new acquisitions occur, Metternich said the company would like to expand its market presence in Tennessee, currently at four properties in the Volunteer State, while also seeking to build regional density in other areas of current communities.

With evolving care needs, Viva Senior Living will continue to expand its aging in place model to help residents age, with Metternich noting that senior living providers today have to be “clinically savvy” and comparing the current senior living acuity spectrum as being comparable to the skilled nursing world of two decades ago.

Since 2020, Viva views all of its staff as having a role in the caregiving and clinical side of operations, and since then, the company has shuffled its staffing ratios across independent living, assisted living and memory care, Metternich said, to build culture and create realistic expectations for new staff entering a building.

“One of the things that we want to make sure that we’re doing at the community level is that we onboard appropriately,” Metternich said. “Showing them a career path, that is so important.”

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