Assisted Living Feasibility Study in the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ Metro Area

One of the country's most concentrated care-home markets

Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler is 2 of 321 metro and micro areas for assisted living without nursing care, and the location quotient of 3.92x is the headline: care homes capture nearly four times as large a share of local SBA approvals as they do of the national total. The class is only 6 of 39 inside the area, so the concentration is a feature of the national comparison rather than of Phoenix's own mix. SBA approved 165 loans between FY2017 and FY2026, worth $160.6 million.

Ordinary tickets, rare franchising

Where the volume is exceptional, the typical loan is not. The median of $754,000 is 0.99x the class's national median; the central half of loans starts at $432,000 and ends at $1.3 million. SBA 7(a) accounts for 143 loans and SBA 504 for 22, and franchising barely figures at 4.2%. Maricopa County has 159 of the loans and Pinal County 6. Of the yearly counts, only FY2017 (27 loans, $23.2 million), FY2019 (7), FY2021 (31, $28.8 million) and FY2023 (12) are printed. The remaining years are suppressed on thin counts, and a gap is not a zero.

Credit unions and specialists

Arizona Financial Credit Union holds 22 loans worth $14.7 million under 7(a). Alerus Financial, National Association holds 13 worth $11.3 million, Live Oak Banking Company 10 worth $15.3 million, Columbia Bank (OR) 7 worth $7.7 million and BNC National Bank 5 worth $3.6 million. Arizona Capital Source holds 8 of the 504 loans for $4.6 million. These are SBA's current-holder records, and they imply nothing about how any institution views care homes.

No loss figures here

Phoenix care homes arrive without any loss rate, since neither a share cancelled nor a share charged off survives in the source for these homes. They are unknown, not nil. Lenders weighing a Phoenix care home will need the Arizona and national assisted living pages for loss context.

Testing a Phoenix care home

A concentration like this is a warning to a sponsor: the study must prove that the specific submarket is not already saturated by earlier SBA-backed homes, and must measure demand among households able to pay privately. Construction or conversion cost, licensing for the number of beds, staffing and a realistic lease-up all need explicit treatment, with debt service coverage at stabilized occupancy and in a slower case. An appraisal will turn on licensed beds and the income those beds produce. One coding limit: the page's note records how assisted living with nursing is indexed, and a project with nursing on site belongs on other classes' pages. Maricopa and Pinal counties supply every loan, assigned through July 2023 area definitions.