Patricia Will, Founder & CEO, Belmont Village Senior Living

May 2026 — Invest: spoke with Patricia Will, founder and CEO of Belmont Village Senior Living, about how personal caregiving needs became the catalyst for a hospitality-forward model rooted in wellness, research partnerships, and consistent execution across markets. “We’re in a business that depends on hands, heads, and hearts,” Will said.

What inspired you to build Belmont Village’s model of senior living, and how has that original vision shaped the company’s growth?

What inspired me, frankly, was personal experience. I was confronted with the need to find a venue, in this case for my in-laws. They were very close to me, and caregiving was part of my life.

At the time, I was a real estate developer doing primarily medical real estate. I was raising a couple of boys, and caregiving in the home was not working. But the places that I went to see, that could support my in-laws in the lifestyle that they deserved, were not acceptable.

It was one of those rare times where you have the opportunity to use your professional acumen to begin to think about how to solve a personal problem and turn it into an opportunity.

If you look at the model that we began with, now 29 years ago, it was shaped from the beginning. We would build communities that were different in their quality quotient and in their locations. We would undertake first-class, world-class hospitality so that every meal, every activity, and every social experience would be joyful.

And at the same time, we would provide an underbelly of care for people who may need it, but who still want to get up every morning and live well.

Belmont Village is known for its Circle of Friends and other award-winning cognitive health programs. How do you evaluate the impact of these research-based enrichment programs on residents’ quality of life?

One of the hallmarks of Belmont Village, since the beginning and certainly especially now, is to partner with best-in-class research institutions so that we can harvest innovation in many areas, but especially brain health.

We evolved a seven-day-a-week curriculum delivered in all of our communities by trained enrichment leaders. It is designed very carefully to reinforce cognition and connections.

The way that we know it works is that we routinely measure cognitive scores. What we are able to demonstrate is that participants in the program are able to maintain their cognitive levels for longer periods of time.

Even for those who have more advanced cognitive decline, we can change the graph of what that decline looks like and keep them energized, successful, and purposeful for a longer period of time than if they were not participating.

What are some recent partnerships or research initiatives that you believe will have the biggest impact on future programming?

We have multiple initiatives going on across the country right now. One that is very exciting is in Southern California.The Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego has a Living Lab inside our La Jolla building, and we are undertaking research studies there with our seniors actively participating not only in the programs, but also in selecting what interests them to study.

We have worked on subjects as varied as fall prevention, including training a generative AI model to help seniors with respect to fall prevention and other activities to keep safe.

We are also working on one where you are essentially taking a cell phone in your hand, without having to do anything to it, and getting all your vitals transmitted. It is not a wearable, or something that a senior does not want to use. That kind of innovation matters.

If we go across the country, we have a study taking place right now at the University of Texas in Dallas, with their ECHO team. They have done innovative research in a tablet-based game that promotes brain health. We are piloting it and studying it in Dallas and in a couple of our Austin communities.

And if you go to South Florida, our Coral Gables community has an important relationship with Baptist Health. We are working with Baptist in a myriad of ways to enhance wellness for seniors, not only who live in that building, but ultimately seniors across South Florida and the country.

There are many endeavors going on all the time. We tend to pilot these first, and then once we see that they work, we roll them out to all of our communities.

How do you ensure that Belmont Village’s value proposition remains consistent across diverse geographies?

We do that in multiple ways. First, our motto is not just to operate our communities, but to build them from scratch, and then to continue to hone them. We are able to put our imprint, our culture, and our programs in our buildings because we raise investment capital to build them not just as the operating manager, but also as an owner.

We design very deliberately. That applies to activities and the endeavors that we undertake within the building, as well as thinking through seniors themselves and how they move through the space.

With each new project, we also ensure continuity in leadership. We just opened our doors in Aventura, and we are very excited about that.

What you will see in our leadership team members is a combination of people who are brand new to Belmont, but who have been working side by side with Belmont veterans for the last six months, even a year, in other communities. You will also see Belmont veterans moving over to that building to have a hand in bringing it up and assuring that what we deliver is consistent with our other communities.

How do you think company culture and employee experience influence resident satisfaction and outcomes?

It is huge. On any given day, we are no better or worse than where we are at the point of service. In order to assure that at the point of service we have the best of the best, it is really important to take care of the people who are, in turn, giving of themselves to our residents.

I can share a personal experience. My dad passed away recently. He was 95, and he lived at Belmont Village for eight years.

From the time shortly after we moved in that he lost my mom, and through literally the moment he died, the richness of the residents and the staff that surrounded him reinforced for me that we have a culture.

It is a culture of caring, and it is a culture of purpose.

With evolving expectations around wellness, aging in place, and family involvement, how do you anticipate residents’ needs changing in the next decade, and how is Belmont preparing for that?

We are already seeing a change in how residents think about senior living. When I started this 29 years ago, people did not know what it was and had us confused with nursing homes. Today, we already have seniors out there looking for themselves, planning, and thinking about what they want.

For people who are actively engaged in life and want that to continue, they are looking for different kinds of programming. We introduced Lifelong Learning University, a program that now exists in all of our communities in partnership with Rice University’s Glasscock School for Continuing Studies. With real-life professors, we teach coursework interactively in every Belmont Village in the country.

We have residents who were lifelong scientists now studying Art Deco architecture, and people who were English professors now learning physics. Purposeful living, where you are continuing to engage in lifelong learning, is a hallmark of us, and it is much more in demand today than what we have seen previously.

The final thing I would say is that people want more space. No matter how wonderful your common areas are, residents want larger apartments and amenities designed differently. We are bending to that.

Reflecting on your leadership and the company’s evolution since 1997, what have been the most significant lessons that continue to guide Belmont Village’s strategy and approach to senior living today?

We make great real estate, and we are very disciplined with respect to the real estate that we make. But the biggest lessons learned have had to do with the importance of people.

We can use different kinds of tools, certainly some AI tools for analytics, but we’re in a business that depends on hands, heads, and hearts. The importance of the people, both at the leadership level and at the point of service, cannot be underestimated.

No matter how your building looks or what amenities you provide, that human element remains decisive. That is a critical lesson learned for me, over and over again.