Assisted Living Feasibility Study in the Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA Metro Area

Assisted living in Sonoma County's metro area

SBA's files show 38 loans for assisted living without nursing care in the Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA area between FY2017 and FY2026, carrying $35.9 million in gross dollars. Among 321 metro and micro areas with loans in this class, the area ranks 15, and inside the area the class sits 3 of 39. The location quotient of 7.60x says that care homes make up a much heavier portion of Santa Rosa-Petaluma's SBA lending than of lending nationwide. Santa Rosa-Petaluma's median of $641,000 is 0.84x the national median for care homes, while its middle half of loans runs from $317,000 to $1.0 million. We describe these figures without calling any of them distinctive, because none cleared the test we apply for that word.

Programs, holders and the county

Of the 38 loans, 28 are SBA 7(a) and 10 are SBA 504. Franchise affiliation is 0.00%, so every one of these projects stands on its own operator rather than on a brand. The current holders of the 7(a) loans, as SBA reports them, include Redwood CU with 11 loans worth $4.6 million and Pinnacle Bank (CA) with 8 loans worth $6.5 million. On the 504 side, Capital Access Group, Inc. holds 5 loans worth $2.2 million. In SBA's reporting each name is simply who holds or held the loan, which leaves lending practice outside what these figures can say. Sonoma County shows 38 loans, the same figure as the whole area.

The years that can be shown

Several fiscal years are blank here because each carries too few loans to print. FY2018 (6 loans, $3.7 million), FY2020 (7 loans, $5.3 million) and FY2022 (6 loans, $9.6 million) are the years that do print; of them, FY2022 holds the most dollars on the fewest loans. A blank is not a zero. Neither outcome rate is shown: the Sonoma County cohort, loans disbursed in FY2017 to FY2021, is under the 30 loans Loan Analytics needs.

Testing a Sonoma County care home

A feasibility study for a care home in this area should start from the middle half of $317,000 to $1.0 million and ask whether the building, the licensed capacity and the fit-out fit inside it, or whether the project belongs above it. It has to test private-pay demand in the specific part of the county, the cost to build or convert, and debt service coverage with a realistic fill-up period, then show that the appraised value follows from licensed beds and net operating income. On coding, a home earns its own code only if no nursing is provided on site, while memory care is not coded separately. Homes that add nursing share their code with other classes and are counted elsewhere. Area membership follows the project's county on the July 2023 map; a loan with an unplaceable county is dropped.