Dan Baty (Columbia Pacific Advisors)

Seattle-based senior housing developer and owner Columbia Pacific Advisors and its founders announced the pending purchase of Hawthorn Retirement Group, a Vancouver, WA-based owner, developer and operator of senior housing communities in 20 states and two Canadian provinces, on Monday.

Hawthorn has 55 communities in operation, with another 12 communities under construction and 12 in pre-development. In addition to the real estate portfolio, the acquisition will include Hawthorn’s management and construction businesses.

“We are buying what we believe to be one of the best senior living companies ahead of a huge and quickly approaching demographic trend of an aging U.S. population,” Alex Washburn, managing partner and co-founder of Columbia Pacific Advisors, said in a statement. “The Hawthorn platform consists of high-quality properties and a substantial pipeline of opportunity with the right operator to meet head-on the trends and challenges of the senior living industry.”

The transaction is expected to close later this summer. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The principal owners of Hawthorn — Bart and Brad Colson, Norm Brenden and Pat Kennedy — have known and worked with Columbia Pacific Advisors co-founder Dan Baty for many years. Bart and Brad Colson are the sons of Bill Colson, who with Baty were the primary owners of Holiday Retirement before its sale to Fortress Investment Group in 2007. Bart Colson was Holiday’s chief operating officer for 10 years before the company’s sale to Fortress. Brenden and Kennedy also were executives at Holiday. Kennedy, now CEO of Hawthorn, will stay on as a Hawthorn senior executive.

“We couldn’t be happier to continue our work with Dan and the entire team at Columbia Pacific Advisors,” Kennedy said. “Dan understands who we are and how we operate, and collectively the CPA and Hawthorn teams have deep experience in the industry.”

Baty is a big part of that “deep experience.” In addition to being a founder of Columbia Pacific Advisors and an owner of Holiday (where he was chairman from 1987 until 2007), he founded and served as chairman of Emeritus from its inception in 1993 until the company merged with Brookdale Senior Living in 2014.

All told, the Columbia Pacific Advisors management team has executed on more than $13 billion in senior living transactions in the past 25 years. Over the past 10 years, funds managed by Columbia Pacific Advisors have developed or acquired ownership interests in more than 300 senior living communities with a total of more than 25,000 units. Additionally, the firm is active in multifamily and commercial real estate.

Columbia Pacific Advisors currently is building a 237-unit, 24-story retirement community in Seattle. The project was announced in March 2016 and is scheduled to open in 2019.