Scott M. Brinker - HCP, Inc.
Management
Hey. Steve, it's Scott. I'll try to take that. I mean, one thing to keep in mind is that we made the announcement about these transitions way back in November 2017, and here we are in early August. So, it's been eight or nine months. Now, some of the transitions have occurred a couple of months ago. But at a minimum, there is a three- to four-month lag, in some cases, eight or nine months between the announcement and when the actual transfer of the license took place. And until that license transfers there's nothing that the new operator can really do inside of the property. So, there's a long period in between where the local team and staff is sort of in no man's land, and that is an uncomfortable place to be in. If you can imagine putting yourself in those shoes, if you're uncertain about what's going to happen next. And needless to say, that's not a positive thing for the morale and the culture, overtime goes way up, contract labor goes way up, it's hard to find the right staff to lead the building. And then, once the transfer happens, there is a pretty high likelihood that the leadership team is going to be changed, and we've seen that with about half of the properties that have transitioned to-date. The leadership teams gets changed out. And over time, we think that would be the right decision. But in the interim, your building, your community doesn't have a leadership team, and it's hard to market the property and build a staff, train the staff, build the local referral relationship. So, it generally is a three- to nine-month process, three at the low end, nine at the outside timeline to really implement that new team, build that new culture, so that you're in a position where you can really start rebuilding occupancy. And we're right in the middle of that. Some of these properties transitioned in March, some are transitioning still in August. And that's why I say, in terms of a year-over-year comp, it's more likely that the sale – that the growth rate will be late 2019, 2020 before it turns positive although, sequentially, we're going to start seeing some improvement later this year. We're starting to see some early signs already on the Atria transitions that happened in March now that we're 90 to 120 days after the fact. The leadership teams are in place, the deferred maintenance from the – at the property has been cleaned up, the inquiries are trending higher and now it's time to convert that into sales momentum and occupancy improvement.