Patricia Will, CEO, Belmont Village Senior Living

In an interview with Invest:, Patricia Will, CEO of Belmont Village Senior Living, talked about the opportunities that the concentration of affluent seniors in South Florida offers for the company to grow. She also showcased the company’s community projects in Coral Gables and Aventura, and its partnerships with healthcare companies, universities, and hospitality schools to deliver amenities to its customers.

What have been the most significant milestones and achievements for Belmont Village in Greater Fort Lauderdale over the past year?

Our major achievement was the opening of Belmont Village Coral Gables in January 2024. We partnered with Baptist Health South Florida on that fantastic project. The goal there was to create a best-in-class, mixed-use senior housing community that incorporates retail, restaurants, and a first-rate, user-friendly Baptist Health clinic. The land for that project is a walkable city block adjacent to the shops at Merrick Park. It has been immensely gratifying to see the community response to that development. We had record growth in occupancy, and the vibe of the Coral Gables community is like that of a great resort, but with a quiet underbelly of best-in-class care. 

We also broke ground on Belmont Village Aventura. That joint project was developed in partnership with the organization that invented Aventura: Turnberry of the Soffer family. It has been great fun to do that project with a partner who not only has experience in development but also originally owned that land, which has fantastic views of the ocean and the marina. It has also been great to work with another female developer who understands what resonates with our customers. We expect to finish that building at the end of 2025 and open it in early 2026.

What are the most important opportunities that Belmont Village Senior Living has identified in South Florida?

We cannot think of any place in the country with greater promise for our product type than Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. There is a concentration of seniors and next-generation seniors with enormous wealth, as well as a limited high-quality supply in our space. The average age of most of the existing supply is 30 to 40 years old, so it is often obsolete or not what today’s seniors, much less tomorrow’s, look for.

It has been tremendous to see doctors, lawyers, judges, influencers, and CEOs who have been pillars of building the larger communities and embracing our product. We see opportunities in investing up and down the South Florida coast that are unparalleled anywhere in the country aside from California. Nevertheless, we are constantly competing with multifamily and hotel development for land. While we sometimes join them in mixed-use development, it is harder for us to acquire land when those sectors are red-hot. 

The great migration for us is not to smaller markets elsewhere in Florida, but to Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade in coastal Florida. Those who have migrated there have relocated permanently. They are bringing their parents and their companies, which we did not count on when we decided to make these investments. The indigenous population of adult children and seniors is now compounded by a significant migration from the Northeast. That has made what already was a compelling region for investment even more compelling.

How is Belmont Village Senior Living tailoring its services to meet the evolving needs of senior residents?

We are a constant work-in-progress in that we learn from the great institutions that surround us. We have strong relationships with medical institutions, the schools of hospitality at Cornell University and the University of Houston, and institutions that offer state-of-the-art memory care. We constantly aim to raise the bar. 

For instance, our partnership with Baptist Health has brought us to a new level in several aspects. Every Belmont Village has a gym and physical therapists working with seniors to improve functional mobility, but the Baptist-affiliated entity in the Coral Gables community moved its operations into a giant gym adjacent to our gym, where we work together on functional mobility, safe exercise, strength, coordination, and mitigation of fall risk. Residents of the Coral Gables community can go downstairs to receive those services or have physical therapists come to them to do occupational and speech therapy. Having first-rate, geriatric expert physicians employed by Baptist Health at the bottom of the building offers convenience and excellence. 

We also partner with institutions that offer unique opportunities to elevate our standards. We have innovated with Rice University in Houston. That institution has one of the best adult education programs in the country, and in the past year, we have met with them to bring great courses to our seniors. We had a pilot in the Houston and Fort Lauderdale communities. We are taking activities in a senior living community to a level that benefits the intellect, experience, and education of our residents and that allows them to pursue things that interest them. We did something similar with UCLA in California.

How does Belmont Village Senior Living navigate staffing and weather-related challenges in Florida?

In a business as complex as ours and with the population that we serve, we must be mindful of challenges. In terms of staffing, we wanted to be considered the employer of choice by those who work for us. We aim to attract the best people and do an incredible job at retaining them, so we put a huge effort into that in terms of not just pay and training but also offering opportunities for our frontline workers to grow within the company. We have a robust program to identify future leaders and managers and grow them. Some of our people started in the dining rooms but now run buildings as general managers. Additionally, our motto is: “We take care of seniors, so we must take care of ourselves.” Thus, we have good benefits for our employees and their families.

With respect to weather risks, we are present in most of the catastrophic zones, so we have learned what to build. Our new building in Coral Gables can not only withstand winds of up to 220 mph, but it is also possible to hitch a generator that powers the building in addition to the on-site generator capacity. If our part of Miami-Dade lost power, we could support the whole building. In terms of drills, we are in contact with communities inland to offer them the ability to evacuate us if needed. Drilling in terms of going to others or others coming to us is part of our DNA.

How do affordability challenges impact the operations of Belmont Village Senior Living?

We make our real estate in markets where it is very expensive to buy land and build, so our communities tend to be in submarkets with a density of people who can afford us. Nevertheless, there is a looming crisis regarding affordable products in large markets in America, particularly for baby boomers. It is difficult to develop a product, staff it, and still make it affordable. There is no easy solution to affordability, and we do not have a magic bullet for that. Public-private partnerships may be the answer, but politicians keep kicking the can down the road.

What are the top priorities for Belmont Village in Florida and nationally in the next two to three years?

A top priority is ensuring that the leaders of our company have a great bench. For instance, we recruited a president whom I identified as someone who could complement me while I still work, but also carry the baton forward. In that sense, we need to ensure that we bring up the people who will be the future.

Moreover, we will remain active in South Florida in terms of capital investments. We see nothing but opportunity there. Nevertheless, we are careful as a company because we do not see this business as an arms race, and it takes a lot of due care to build and open new buildings. We are working on the sites that we will deliver in the coming years and are excited about growing a footprint in South Florida that is comparable to what we have done in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange County in California.