Something in the demographic numbers on a 55-plus deal is not lining up for me and I need someone who has closed one to tell me why.

The cap rate numbers you pulled are actually consistent with the demographic thesis, not a contradiction of it. Here is the gap worth closing.

Cap rate (the annual income a property produces divided by its sale price, expressed as a percentage) moves with local liquidity as much as with demographics. A 6.8 or 7.1 in Spokane does not say buyers are skeptical of the demand story. It says Spokane is a secondary market, meaning fewer institutional buyers are competing for the same asset. Fewer bidders means less upward pressure on price and therefore less downward pressure on the cap rate. In a primary market like Seattle or Denver, the same property with the same resident base and the same demographic backdrop might trade a full point tighter, at 5.8 or 6.0, purely because more capital is chasing it.

On your turnover velocity instinct: that is a real underwriting variable and worth following. In independent living, a community that turns over residents every three to five years due to health changes, not just lease expiration, carries a re-leasing cost and a short revenue window per resident. Buyers will price that into their income assumptions even when the regional population growth number looks strong.

So the two things that would tighten pricing, a larger buyer pool and longer average resident tenure, may both be working against Spokane, independently of whether the demographic tailwind is real.

I am not certain of the current cap rate range in Spokane specifically and I would confirm that with a local senior housing broker before drawing conclusions. Marcus and Millichap and JLL both publish senior housing transaction data by market.

One thing worth knowing before you go further: the Real Estate Financial Fingerprint at projectrena.com/fingerprint would tell you whether this strategy actually fits how you operate, because senior housing has operational layers that are easy to underestimate from the numbers alone.

What is drawing you to Spokane specifically, is it access to deals, proximity, or something in the numbers?

Turnover velocity is exactly the variable that kills the narrative, but I'd push it one level deeper: what is the average resident age at move-in across those two communities, because if it's 68-plus, the operating cost curve over a five-year hold gets ugly fast and buyers are pricing that, not the Census line.

The 55-74 cohort growth you're citing is real, but the 55-to-62 slice of that cohort almost never buys into age-restricted housing, they're still working, still attached to their neighborhoods. What actually converts is a much narrower band, and Spokane's thin transaction market means buyers have maybe two comps to anchor to, so they're discounting uncertainty on top of the operational risk.

What's the unit mix, and does either deal skew toward rentals versus for-sale, because those underwrite completely differently and I'd want to know which model you're actually looking at before I'd put a number on whether 7.1 is cheap or fair?