Dial Senior Living is preparing for future growth, with plans to take on 10 to 12 new communities via acquisition annually for the next five years.
Dial Senior Living operates 37 senior living communities in six states with corporate headquarters located in Omaha, Nebraska. As the company has grown, Dial leaders have taken steps to improve data and analytics to support communities while “creating accountability” to improve operating performance, according to Dial Senior Living CEO Ted Lowndes.
By the end of the year, Lowndes said Dial Senior Living could have 40 communities under management.
In early 2024, an affiliate of The Inland Real Estate Group facilitated the acquisition of a portfolio of communities from The Waters Senior Living, with Dial Senior Living taking on the management company based in Minneapolis. In the future, Lowndes said Dial Senior Living would continue to look for smaller management companies that are seeking to exit the senior living industry. Both Dial Senior Living and The Waters are subsidiaries of real estate company Dial.
Dial, which owns assets spanning hotels, apartments, shopping centers and retail, entered the senior living industry in the mid-90s with a community in San Antonio. Shortly after that, Dial redeveloped a community in Deadwood, South Dakota, that attracted investors including actor Kevin Costner, who had filmed “Dances with Wolves” near the market in 1990. The actor was in fact the first investor in Dial’s senior living venture, Lowndes said.
Originally, the company developed senior living communities and leased them to third-party managers, but that led to “misalignment” and gave way to the launch of the Dial Senior Living platform, Lowndes said.
Recently, Dial Senior Living acquired five properties over the last six months and is planningmulti-phase additions to these communities to add value without taking on the full risk of new construction.
For example, the company recently started a renovation at a community in Omaha to add independent living onto the campus to support the desire of older adults to age in place. These types of additions can be done through Dial Senior Living’s dual licensure for states it operates in to provide assisted living services.
In 2025, Dial Senior Living spent $10 million on capital expenditure projects in order to keep properties competitive as a new generation of senior living customers emerges demanding more wellness options, Lowndes said.
“We have to be prepared for that next evolution of consumer expectation,” Lowndes said in an interview with Senior Housing News. “Hospitality has to be ingrained in everything from dining to how you infuse that into nursing.”
At the same time, Dial Senior Living is leaning into independent living even as rising resident acuity is making operations for the product type more complex, Lowndes said.
To meet higher acuity demand as the lines between independent living and assisted living blur, Dial Senior Living relies on a care navigator program that offers IL residents access to a rounding physician and access to what Lowndes defines as “wellness care” or preventative health checkups.
“We want to have the ability to care for our independent living residents, and if they need certain aids in living, then we have the ability to easily transition them to our assisted living at the same time,” Lowndes said.
New independent living additions to Dial Senior Living properties include larger units, spacious windows, upscale appliances and high-end finishes, Lowndes said.
The company has integrated elements of artificial intelligence (AI) to help aggregate data for community leadership and created efficiencies to allow leaders to spend more time interacting with residents, Lowndes said.
“The data is being spoon-fed to them and they’re going into communities loaded with everything they need,” Lowndes said.
For example, Dial Senior Living sales teams are given key performance indicator (KPI) datasets related to lead scoring to better sell the value proposition of a community to older adults. In recent years, the company has focused on improving employee turnover, now at 65% compared to the annual industry average of 85% to “double down” on creating a positive and productive work culture, Lowndes said.
To succeed in hiring, Dial Senior Living looks internally for leadership development, coaching promising candidates to take on future leadership positions. Through its program called “operation fully staffed,” Dial Senior Living communities target reaching at capacity with full-time employees across all departments.
Dial Senior Living relies on real-time staffing data to show where communities need staff and what coaching or leadership development could be offered to improve a community. To build the culture Lowndes speaks of, corporate leaders at Dial organize a summer road trip, touring all communities and bringing a haul of games, gifts and prizes for employees.
“The foundation is culture and we build everything else on top of that,” Lowndes said. “We view how people enjoy working in our organization as the foundation that we build everything on.”
Two years ago, Dial Senior Living launched two leadership academies, one early leadership academy and an advanced leadership academy. Employees are nominated to participate by executive directors across Dial Senior Living communities before embarking on improving their on-the-job knowledge.
“We used to hire for credentials, but we’ve gone away from that to trying to find the right person with the right heart and to teach them the job,” Lowndes said.
