Elevation
Delivering the Future of Healthcare Real Estate Through Resilience and Innovation
During 2024, the global capital and real estate markets faced continued headwinds due to fluctuating bond yields, political shifts and persistent inflation. Elevation, HealthInvestor’s 2025 Property Investor of the Year, discusses how resilience and innovation are essential in a difficult climate. In recognition of their achievements, the judges praised Elevation’s specialist insight into healthcare real estate, its investments in both operational cash flows and leased income and its core focus on ESG.
Healthcare – A sector on the rise
Despite the challenges of 2024, Elevation’s team was committing to sizable transactions across their three investment pillars: leased real estate, joint venture equity and lending. Elevation has seen increasing appetite from investors in allocating capital to healthcare, comforted by the strong fundamentals of the sector; chiefly that healthcare assets deliver needs-based services underpinned by a demand/supply imbalance, generating great social value and long-term inflation-linked cash flows.
Meanwhile, operators have been demonstrating continued resilience and have had strong performance notwithstanding the ongoing challenges with budgets, staff recruitment, local authority fee rises and increasing regulatory demands. Amidst this backdrop, operators are working to integrate the latest safety and environmental technology and adapt to new regulatory requirements. In so doing, the bar for best practice in the industry is consistently rising to the benefit of the residents, staff and families.
Building for longevity
Elevation has seen increased requests from investors to measure, monitor and improve ESG outcomes and anticipates this trend will continue. More recently, the CQC has integrated a quality statement for environmental sustainability into their assessment of NHS Trusts, which will likely be rolled out to the wider health and social care sector. Working with operators, Elevation has encouraged early adoption of technologies and the documentation of ESG-related activities, which will help operators evidence best practice under increased scrutiny in the future.
Currently, there is a push towards integrating energy-saving technologies, driven by operators looking to make efficiency and long-term financial savings and investors wanting to boost the resilience of their assets. Contrary to perception, Elevation has seen the payback period for solar panel installation reduce to under six years for those homes participating in its ESG capex scheme.
Beyond environmental aspects, there’s a growing movement to further the positive social contributions being made for residents, staff and the wider community. Experience shows care homes that can evidence social activities, particularly those that encourage intergenerational and community engagement have greater long-term success. In general, the sector already does excellent work.
Building on success
The HealthInvestor award is a pause for celebration for the Elevation team. 2024 was an exceptional year, with AUM increasing 40% to exceed £2.1bn (or £2.25bn as of 31 March 2025), through notable transactions including the acquisition of the real estate underlying Berkley Care Group, a group of 11 care homes, from Clariane S.E. and the acquisition of Signature’s real estate and operations in partnership with an investment manager. Additionally, construction started on 15 pre-let developments which will provide high-quality care homes in partnership with leading operators and developers.
Looking ahead, this momentum is continuing as Elevation’s operator partners have ambitious plans to grow their businesses, delivering social value and addressing the undersupply of care beds. The growing commitment Elevation is seeing across the industry to integrate cutting-edge technologies and sustainable practices ensures that we are collectively championing healthcare real estate that meets the needs of communities more effectively.