Does anyone actually separate income from the independent living side and the service add-ons when they underwrite one of these

Your instinct to pull these apart is correct, and the assumption doing the most work in the broker's underwriting is that the 7 percent management fee is sufficient to cover a service-layer operation. It almost certainly is not. A pure residential management fee on a stabilized age-restricted property typically runs 6 to 8 percent. Once you add staffed housekeeping, transport coordination, and a wellness program, you are running something closer to a light-service operator model, and those operations carry management costs that can push 10 to 12 percent when fully loaded. The broker is letting the management contract absorb both functions at residential rates.

On the ancillary margin, your math is close to right. If two housekeepers and a part-time driver run $80k all in, and the gross ancillary is $112k, you have a $32k margin before any supply cost, insurance allocation, scheduling overhead, or program management time. That margin is real but thin, and it is also more correlated to resident preference than to lease obligation. You are right that you cannot underwrite it like a vacant unit. A vacant unit has a defined floor, a market rent, and a re-leasing timeline. An opted-out housekeeping subscription has no floor and no re-leasing mechanism.

The structure I have seen applied to deals like this: underwrite the residential NOI on a standalone basis at a cap rate appropriate for stabilized age-restricted residential in that submarket, treat the ancillary as a separate operating business with its own cost stack, and apply a heavier discount rate or a haircut to the ancillary NOI before blending. Some buyers price the ancillary at zero and call it upside, which is aggressive in the other direction but defensible as a conservative position in negotiation.

On the lender question, most agency and CMBS lenders will want the ancillary segregated regardless, because it complicates their collateral assessment. Confirm with your lender how they classify light-service independent living versus pure residential, because that classification can affect loan structure and covenants. That is a question for your lender in writing, not something to assume from the term sheet.

What is the actual occupancy split between units on a plain lease and units with at least one ancillary service opted in?

Your instinct to separate the two income streams is right, and the broker's blended NOI is doing real work obscuring that.

The ancillary revenue, meaning the housekeeping, transport, and wellness fees residents pay on top of base rent, behaves differently from residential rent in a few important ways. Rent is governed by a lease with a notice period. A housekeeping subscription can end with a phone call. You cannot underwrite those two streams at the same cap rate, and many lenders will not let you try.

On the expense side, I think you have already found the problem. If two housekeepers and a van driver cost roughly $80k against $112k in ancillary gross, the net margin on that layer is thin before you add supplies, insurance, scheduling overhead, or any liability that comes with putting someone in a resident's unit. A 7 percent management fee calculated on total gross revenue does not expand to cover a service-layer operation at the same ratio a pure residential property would need. Those two things together, thin margins and an understated expense base, mean the ancillary piece is probably contributing far less to supportable NOI than the blended number implies.

What I would want to see before going further: a separate income and expense schedule for the ancillary services, a list of which residents are enrolled and for how long, and the actual management contract to understand whether the 7 percent covers service coordination or just leasing and unit management. A lender doing agency debt on this will likely want to see that breakout too, and some will haircut ancillary revenue to 50 percent of face or exclude it from the NOI they will lend against.

Your 5.1 on residential NOI alone is the number I would stress-test first. What does it look like if you add a realistic expense load to the ancillary side and treat that revenue at a higher cap rate than the base rent?