Why Assisted Living Is the Next Big Move in Real Estate
May 18, 2026
If you’ve been hearing about assisted living and wondering if it’s too late, I get it. I had the same question at one point. But what I’ve seen is this, we are still very early, and the opportunity is only getting bigger.
Want the full breakdown? Watch the video below👇
The demand is growing fast and it is not slowing down
Here is what you need to understand first. The demand for assisted living is massive, and it will stay that way for decades. Every day, thousands of people are aging into the stage of life where they may need help.
I have seen many people think they missed the window. That is not true. You are still early. The wave is just starting to build, and you still have time to get in and do this right.
đź’ˇ Think of it like this. More people aging means more people needing care. That simple shift creates a huge opportunity.
âś… Look at your local area and ask, “How many older adults live here now?”
The 5% rule helps you see the real opportunity
I like to keep things simple, and this rule does that. The 5% rule says that about 5% of a group you serve will need assisted living at any time.
So let’s say you have 10,000 people in your target age group. That means around 500 people will likely need care. Now scale that up across cities and states, and you start to see the gap.
Right now, there are not enough beds to meet that need. Not even close. That gap is where your opportunity lives.
đź’ˇ This is not guesswork. It is simple math that shows a clear shortage.
âś… Do a quick estimate in your area using the 5% rule
Assisted living can create stronger cash flow than rentals
This is where real estate investors really start to pay attention. Assisted living is not just about the property. It is about the business inside the property.
Instead of one tenant, you have multiple residents. That means multiple streams of income in one home. You can also offer added services that increase revenue.
I have seen this model outperform traditional rentals again and again. You are not waiting on appreciation. You are running a business that produces income now.
You also have options:
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Own the real estate only
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Run the business only
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Or do both together
Each path can work. It just depends on your goals.
âś… Decide if you want to own, operate, or do both
This model holds strong even in tough times
One thing I love about assisted living is this: people will always need care. No matter what the economy is doing, that need does not go away.
In a downturn, people may cut back on other things. But they will still pay for care for a loved one. That makes this model more stable than many other real estate plays.
Also, even with new tech and AI, people still want human interaction. You cannot replace that connection. That's what keeps this business strong long term.
đź’ˇ Housing plus healthcare creates a powerful and stable model
âś… Focus on needs-based services, not wants
You can grow, scale, and exit in multiple ways
This is another reason I chose this space. You are not locked into one path. You have options as you grow.
You can:
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Sell the real estate
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Sell the business
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Keep both and scale
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Refinance and expand
I have seen people build one home, then turn it into many. Systems and processes make it possible to grow without burning out.
You can even invest out of state if you build the right team. That opens up even more opportunities.
đź’ˇ Flexibility is one of the biggest advantages here
âś… Start with one property and build from there
If you are serious about getting started, I walk through this step by step inside the Roadmap Challenge. It is where you get clarity and a real plan.
Wrap Up
Assisted living is not just another trend. It is a long-term shift driven by real demand. When you combine that with strong cash flow and flexibility, it becomes a powerful opportunity.
You do not need to have it all figured out today. Just start learning, take one step, and build from there.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the Free Business Plan Checklist.
And if you’re ready to figure out your next step, join me for the next Roadmap Challenge, where I’ll walk you through how to get started.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00 - 00:00:48
Are you a real estate investor who has been hearing a little bit about assisted living, thinking, "Oh, maybe maybe this is interesting, but is it really going to be successful?" In this video, I'm going to tell you why assisted living is the next big thing in in real estate and why it is here to stay. So, if you're interested in learning about that, make sure you stick around for today's video. Hey friend, my name is Brandon Gustafson with Assisted Living Investing. I help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs
00:00:24 - 00:01:14
launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. Super excited to be here with you today as we talk about why assisted living is the big thing in real estate over the next several decades and how you can jump on that train today to help you be successful. If you want some help and some guidance with that, I'll talk a little bit about it here at the end of the video, but also want to encourage you to go check out the roadmap challenge. Roadmapchallenge.com would
00:00:49 - 00:01:39
love to see you inside of an upcoming challenge. And if you need some help and some guidance and you're just not sure what is a good fit for you, I'm going to have a QR code for you down here in the bottom corner that you can scan at any point or you can just go to aliquiz.com and take the quiz. Uh it will takes you 30 seconds, identifies the best program for you that I have to help you launch your assisted living business successfully. So would love to see you in there. With that, let's get into
00:01:13 - 00:02:10
today's video. Hey friend, welcome back. In today's video, we are going to be talking about why assisted living and getting an assisted living home is the next big move for you in real estate and how it can help you be successful. So, the the first thing I want you to understand is there is massive demand, massive, massive demand for this and there's going to be for decades to come. Like, this is a huge thing. You're still getting in. You may have been hearing about assisted living for years now.
00:01:47 - 00:02:32
I've been doing YouTube on assisted living since 2021. So, there's a ton of content out there. So, you may be thinking, "Oh, you know, it's too late. I can't get into it." But I'm here to tell you, you're still at the very front of that wave. It is going to be huge. It's going to be massive. You can still jump in and be successful and set yourself up for decades to come, which is really cool. Every day, here's the math on it. So, you know, you can see a
00:02:09 - 00:03:15
little bit of of how the silver tsunami is coming. Every day, 10,000 Americans are turning 65 and older. That doesn't mean you are serving a population of 65. It just means like that's the volume of people that are coming into this age group that are going to need help. 10,000 Americans every single day are turning 65. It's insane, right? By 2030, every single baby boomer will be over the age of 65. Now, that doesn't mean that you're serving that population, but it means in 10 years, by 2040, every
00:02:42 - 00:03:46
single baby boomer will be 75. And that is huge. That is a population you will almost certainly be working with in the world of assisted living. It's big. Like this just shows you the longevity. Like it is it's coming. Baby boomers are already starting to age into that age range and it's just going to happen for the next 10 to 15 years. Like it's huge, right? By 2050. There's also a projection that 58 to 82 million Americans will be over the age of 65. That's a 47% increase. So, we're just
00:03:14 - 00:04:09
seeing this huge just increase in the amount of people that are aging that are going to need assisted living services at some point. In my book, the profitable assisted living facility, it looks like this. You can get it on Amazon or if you go to the alibook.com, I talk about something that I call the 5% rule. And the basically the 5% rule, if you want to learn a little bit more about it, just type in five down below. We'll do a video for you specific to it. But the 5% rule says that at any given
00:03:41 - 00:04:42
time, 5% of the population in in an age group, not not 5% of all of the population, but 5% of the group that I want to serve, whether it's elderly population or I want to serve mental health or whatever, 5% of those people will need assisted living. Okay? So really quick math, that means that if I have a population that there's 10,000 people that are in a specific little geographic pocket that fit my age criteria, the criteria that I want for my group of people, 500 of those people are going to need assisted living
00:04:12 - 00:05:14
services. Like that's really basic how this is going to work. Okay? Uh there 20,000 people, it's a thousand. So when we look at this nationwide and we say that there are 58 million Americans that are going to be over this age uh that are over 65 by 2050. If that's the age group that I want to work with, that means I need to have 2.9 million beds. 2.9 million beds is how many I need to have. Do you want to know how many there are today? Like we've been doing assisted living for decades.
00:04:43 - 00:05:54
Like this has been a thing for years and years and decades. It's been a thing for forever, right? Do you want to know how many beds there are in America today for assisted living? There's 1.2 million. That's per the AHCA and NCA, these are nationally recognized organizations. There are only 1.2 million assisted living beds. And my 5% rule on the low end of that 58 to 82 million Americans that are going to be 65 and older by the year 2050. On the low end of that, we need 2.9 million beds. That means there's this
00:05:17 - 00:06:15
gap of 1.7 million beds. It's huge, right? This is a huge, huge gap. I I don't even know if I can express to you. It's more than double where we're at today. And we've been doing this for decades. So, there's this huge need that's going to be coming into assisted living. From a pure economic standpoint, assisted living is such a safe bet. it would take us so long because there's not enough housing available. There's this huge shortage. And so what you're going to see when it comes to assisted
00:05:47 - 00:06:39
living is there's this huge demand that's coming. It's just on the horizon. And I did a video, we'll link it up above, uh for home health versus assisted living and why you may or may not choose one of those, but there's going to be so many of them that are going to choose assisted living. And we have a shortage of it and there's going to be huge demand for people wanting assisted living services. So this is the time to get in. It really is like pure economics. There's huge demand that is
00:06:13 - 00:07:07
coming. There's already huge demand here. There's huge demand that's coming and you are getting in at the start of of the title wave. So get in now. If you need some help, you need some guidance, go to aliquiz.com, take my 30 secondond quiz, QR code over here in the bottom corner, scan that, go take the quiz, see which of my programs are best fit for you, and start taking action and start moving towards launching your assisted living business. Like, you need to do this. If you're in real estate, you want
00:06:40 - 00:07:32
something that can leave a legacy, you want something that can be profitable, you need to get into this. Like, it it's it's a huge huge opportunity. Okay, I'll get off my my high horse on this, but if you want to be successful, you want to be profitable, this is the thing you should be doing. Get into it. All right, the other thing that I want to share with you is assisted living cash flow is going to beat traditional rentals like every day of the week. Pretty cool, right? So, this is because there are
00:07:06 - 00:07:55
multiple streams of income. You have multiple residents inside the house. Uh maybe you do Medicaid, maybe you do private pay, maybe you offer some extra services that you can charge money for as well. Uh, so there's multiple streams of income in just one home, which is pretty incredible. The income is not tied to your appreciation of the real estate. It's tied to the services that you're offering, the business that you're running. There are higher margins than single family rentals, like
00:07:30 - 00:08:14
significantly higher. And the business income plus the real estate value is also huge. There's actually a few ways you can do this. I would love to hear from you. Comment this down below. Are you somebody that wants to just own the real estate? And maybe you just want to find somebody that you can rent out to. If that's the case, type in re down below. So, I know my real estate people that that just want to own the business. They just want to lease it out to people. You could be somebody, maybe
00:07:52 - 00:08:34
you're getting into this and maybe you're a nurse that's watching this and you're like, I'm actually really interested in this, but I don't have the funds to do this. Or maybe you're a real estate person, but you're not sure how to get into this, but maybe you have some background in healthcare or something like that, and you want just the business. You want to lease from somebody. You want to buy just the business from somebody and operate in somebody else's facility, right? type in
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operate down below if that's you. If that's the person that that you want to be, you just want to be doing that with it. Okay? Or you can do what I do and you can do both of them. So, type in both if this is you down below where you own the real estate, you own the business and then you have some pass through income that comes from the operational side over to the real estate side. You can create some really good tax advantages for yourself and put yourself in a really good position when
00:08:38 - 00:09:25
you do this, especially at scale. Um, and you can do both of those. So, you have a few different options in how you get into this. So, which one of those are you? Which one are you most interested in? RE operate or both? Which one? Which one? Comment those down below. Uh let me know where you're at in the process and what your where your head's at. And it's okay if you shift over time. It's totally fine. But there's a lot of different options in here where you can do that and create
00:09:02 - 00:09:45
value for yourself, create value for your communities, and really help people out. I also want to point out that this business is recession resistant because people are always going to need care. um they might think, okay, well, I'm actually just going to keep them at home. I'm going to do home health. Again, go check out that video where we talked about home health. And I think home health is great, especially if it's a good fit for the resident, for the person that needs that care, but it's
00:09:23 - 00:10:17
also at scale that if you needed somebody in your home 24/7, I do some math in that video to show you exactly what that looks like. And it's not sustainable. It's just ridiculously expensive. And so assisted living is a really good balance between those things. People are going to need care. Like it's just people as they get older, their health starts to go down. It degrades over time and they're going to need assistance. It doesn't matter what the economy looks like, they're going to
00:09:50 - 00:10:48
need that assistance. Today, there's government programs around this. There's Medicaid that can help out with assisted living. there's going to be such a huge voter block that is going to need these services that I can absolutely foresee there being some kind of uh government program that is put into place that is going to help pay for these services for people because uh politicians are not going to want to let this go. They're not going to want to alienate a big voting block and they're going to
00:10:19 - 00:11:17
implement some type of of system. Like I just I just 100% can see this happening as this evolves over time. So it's something to keep an eye on. But you're going to have that. We also live in an AIdriven world. And while that world is fun and exciting and I love working with AI things, people when they need care, they want personal interaction and they can only get that in certain situations. And so you are offering that. Healthcare is one of those industries that I think will evolve quite a bit when it comes to
00:10:48 - 00:11:47
AI and the improvements and I'm really excited about what it's going to do to the industry, but I also fully believe that persontoperson caregiving is not going away. So, it's recession resistance. It's AI resistant. It's going to uh just be incredible. And also, like I mentioned, housing plus healthcare creates stability for you. Uh people are going to need that care. they're going to need a physical location to do it and it's not always feasible to do that inside of their own home and so they're
00:11:18 - 00:12:02
going to be looking for assisted living facilities. Whereas if you're doing single family rentals or things like that, hey, somebody could go move in with their parent or they could be, you know, renting out a home or living in a home with multiple families. There's ways for them to get around that and to skirt that a little bit and it can have an impact on you when recession hits. But in assisted living, you're not going to see that very much because people need that care. It's a thing.
00:11:40 - 00:12:40
Everybody's going to need it. So, you're going to see that value continue to go up. And the other really cool thing that I think is awesome about assisted living is you have built-in exit and scaling opportunities. It's pretty cool, right? So, that means you could just sell the real estate by itself or you could just sell the business and keep the real estate. You get to choose if you want to just do one of those. You have multiple exit strategies, which is great. You can build this up and implement systems and
00:12:10 - 00:13:00
processes and really get something good going and then you can scale that over multiple properties which is really cool. You can do this out of state like I do. If you're interested in learning more about that, type in out of state down below and I'll I'll do a video on how to operate out of state. That can give you some guidance on exactly what that looks like. One thing you can also do is you can refinance these. So if you start out with private or hard money, that's all you can do. you've got to pay
00:12:35 - 00:13:24
higher interest rates, you can continue to do that and ultimately refinance this into something that is a little more stable like an SBA loan or a HUD loan, which can really help you out, stabilize your business, help you become profitable. Um, so there's ways that you can do that. I know several people that they use that strategy to help them acquire a lot of buildings quickly and then stabilize it over time and they're successful in growing their portfolio. And the other really cool thing is you
00:12:59 - 00:13:48
can create long-term wealth with this business while also having an incredible impact on your family, your legacy, the community that you live in. Um, like honestly, it is one of those businesses that is absolutely just life-giving. It's so much fun to see the impact that you get to have when you are running an assisted living business. I absolutely love it. So, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like the video, subscribe, ring the bell as well so you get notified every time we put out
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content. We go live on most Tuesdays. We put out content on Thursdays to help you out in guiding you in launching your assisted living business. To recap what we talked about today, we talked about the massive, massive demand that is coming with assisted living. So, do not miss it. Absolutely do not miss it. We talked about the 5% rule. So, make sure you go and watch that. If you're interested in learning more about that, type in five down below. We can do a video specifically on the 5% rule. We
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how cash flow is going to beat traditional rentals with assisted living. It's going to beat it like every day of the week. Um, it's recession resistant and you have built-in exit and scaling opportunities with it. So, I hope you found this video helpful. I chatted about this at the start of the video. I want to remind you to go check out the roadmap challenge. Go to roadmapchallenge.com and learn more. But, this is a live coaching experience. I'm going to help you out. If you're in
00:14:11 - 00:14:58
the VIP room, it's virtual. You can ask me any questions. I can help you along the path. I'll help you get clarity on how this is actually going to work and the numbers and all of those things. And then in the actual challenge itself, which is taught live and there's work to be done and we're working together and I give you a workbook, we work, there's homework, things that I want you to do that's going to help you be able to move forward with clarity and confidence to know if this is the right business for
00:14:35 - 00:15:20
you. We're going to go through helping define your why, why you want to be in assisted living, which is huge in building your business plan. We're going to talk about numbers, like how to run numbers, underwrite, see if this will actually be profitable for you or not. so you can, you know, have clarity and confidence that this is going to be a good fit for you. We're going to talk about the different paths that you can go down to get into assisted living. There's four different paths. We're
00:14:57 - 00:15:40
going to talk about those in depth. We're going to talk about the different funding strategies, and there's a ton of them. And also the licensing process. So, if you need help with any of those things, we're going to build a road map. It's specific to you cuz you're writing it down. You're building things out. Um, but I'm here to guide you and help you out along the way. Again, go to roadmapchallenge.com to learn more. would love to have you in one. They're taught live. We have another one coming
00:15:19 - 00:16:07
up soon. Would love to see you there. Roadmapchallenge.com. If you need some help and some guidance and you're not sure which of my programs is a good fit for you, go take the quiz. Again, QR code over here in the corner. Uh, scan that or go to aliquiz.com. It's going to give you, it's 30 seconds, doesn't take hardly any time. It tells you which of my programs, including the roadmap challenge, is going to be the best fit for you. I would love to help you out, help you get inside one of those
00:15:42 - 00:16:31
programs, work with me directly, help you navigate the process, all of the complexities that you're going to see as you get into this business, remove those roadblocks for you, help you do that so that you I can guide you and help you out in launching your assisted living business. So, this is on you, but I want to guide you and remove those roadblocks so you don't make the costly and time-consuming mistakes that I made as I was getting started. Are you curious about assisted living investing, but
00:16:07 - 00:16:55
you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I'm here to help first-time assisted living entrepreneurs launch profitable, purpose-driven businesses, creating prosperity, purpose, and peace in their lives. I would love to help you. I love coaching. Go take the quiz, aliquiz.com. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do, and you are consistent and persistent, you are going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have
00:16:30 - 00:16:33
a great day.
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