Greensboro's Bell Partners Sells Senior Living Portfolio in $300 Million Deal

Bell Partners shed its senior living business in a deal worth more than $300 million, unloading 22 communities to Senior Housing Properties Trust and exiting a segment it had spent years building across the Southeast to concentrate on apartments at a scale measured in billions.

The late-July sale transferred properties across five states: 10 senior living locations in North Carolina, six each in South Carolina and Florida, two in Virginia and two in Georgia. Four additional properties were slated to close by year's end, bringing the full planned divestiture to 26 assets. Bell Partners retained two North Carolina senior living communities.

Senior Housing Properties Trust, a publicly traded real estate investment trust, engaged Five Star Quality Care to handle onsite management of the former Bell Senior Living properties after the closing. Five Star operates more than 200 independent living, assisted living, skilled health care, and continuing care retirement communities across 30 states.

For Greensboro, where Bell Partners keeps its headquarters on North Greene Street, the pivot means one of the city's largest private real estate operations is concentrating entirely on apartments rather than dividing its attention between two distinct property types. The company employed more than 1,600 associates across six offices and already owned or operated 211 apartment properties holding about 61,000 homes, concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and Southwest. More than 20,000 of those units were under renovation at the time of the senior living sale.

Company president Jon Bell described the divestiture as part of "a strategic shift over the last 18 months" designed to sharpen Bell Partners' national apartment standing. "We are focused on being one of the best apartment investment and management companies in the U.S.," Bell said, noting the firm ranked among the top 10 apartment operators nationally according to the National Multi-Housing Council. The company was also recruiting multifamily executives from leading apartment REITs as part of the repositioning.

The apartment ambition is backed by firepower that would have seemed unimaginable when Steve Bell, a UNC Chapel Hill graduate and son of a Raleigh oral surgeon, founded the company in 1976. Bell assembled his first $2 million by persuading 10 to 15 of his father's doctor and lawyer friends to buy older complexes of fewer than 100 units in small Piedmont towns including Elkin, Hickory and Lenoir. "I knew as a college kid that I wanted to go into the investment real-estate business," Bell said. His first real estate mentor was the late McKibben Lane, a former president of a Greensboro yarn manufacturing company who later worked in commercial and industrial brokerage.

Buying steadily larger properties pushed the company's average acquisition from $4 million in 1976 to roughly $70 million. The company's sixth equity fund, a $600 million pool closed in June, gave Bell Partners the capacity to deploy more than $1.7 billion in rental properties. It completed $645 million in multifamily purchases through October alone, including a 300-unit community in Annapolis, Md.

The senior living sale closed a longer arc of diversification and selective retreat: Bell Partners had also owned Charlotte's Cotswold Village shopping center between 2002 and 2009 before focusing on residential real estate. With senior housing transferred to SNH and Five Star, the company's Greensboro operation has a single, unambiguous mandate going forward.