Is senior housing sexy? One multimillionaire gambled on it amid COVID and turned it into a $160 billion business that's exploding

But Mitra is focused on something a little more down to earth than building robo taxis and sending rockets into space: senior housing. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, he’s shown that it’s equally explosive.

Today, Mitra runs the world’s largest real estate investment trust (REIT) — built entirely on senior-living communities. In just six years, he increased the value of Welltower (NYSE: WELL) to $160 billion, and its shares skyrocketed from around $40 to more than $200.

That’s all the more impressive when you consider he gambled $40 billion of Welltower’s money to do it.

Mitra is not only in the same CEO class as Musk, but he’s also a maverick who takes risks when he sees opportunity. And he saw an opportunity in COVID-19.

Timing the senior housing market amid the pandemic

Senior housing didn’t look like a great investment in 2020. Nursing homes and assisted living facilities were ground zero for many COVID-19 outbreaks, and, tragically, the site of 42% of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S. that year.

Still, Mitra — a Columbia grad with an MBA in Applied Value Investing — saw the need for such facilities. An estimated 2.1 million Americans lived in them at the time.

Mitra saw beyond the pandemic and also beyond the U.S. So he launched a $40 billion, six-year buying spree, snapping up thousands of senior housing units across North America and the U.K.

Today, Welltower owns 2,500 senior-living facilities offering everything from independent living to assisted living and memory care. While Welltower owns the properties, it lets its partners — multinational operators including Sunrise Senior Living and Atria Senior Living — run them.

The company’s holdings are concentrated in communities with dense populations of older adults who can afford higher-end, private-pay senior-living facilities.

The Wall Street Journal cites the example of one such property in Manhattan — Sunrise at East 56th — for which residents pay a minimum of $15,330 a month to live there.