Ziegler Link-Age Management III

The fund's investment committee is chaired by John Hopper, who serves as Chief Investment Officer. Prior to co-founding the Link-Age fund platform, Hopper was a managing director at Harrison Street Real Estate Capital, where he focused on senior-housing and healthcare acquisitions. He operates alongside Dan Hermann, Ziegler's president and CEO, who has overseen the parent firm's investment-banking activities in seniors housing and healthcare since the early 2000s.

Ziegler is a Chicago-based specialty investment bank founded in 1902 that concentrates on healthcare, senior living, and education finance. Ziegler Link-Age Management III is a separate investment-management entity formed in 2018 in partnership with Link-Age Ventures. Ziegler serves as the fund's placement agent and anchor sponsor, and the fund sources a substantial portion of its deal pipeline through Ziegler's investment-banking client relationships.

The fund makes direct equity investments in private-pay senior-housing real estate — primarily independent-living, assisted-living, and memory-care communities. It will also selectively invest in skilled-nursing facilities and post-acute-care assets, as well as health-and-wellness service companies adjacent to its real estate portfolio. The fund does not invest in acute-care hospitals or life-science real estate.

The fund benefits from Ziegler's century-long investment-banking presence in the senior-living and healthcare sectors. Ziegler has underwritten and placed roughly $16 billion in senior-living debt and equity financings over two decades, generating a proprietary pipeline of operators seeking capital for acquisitions, recapitalizations, and development. This gives the fund access to off-market and limited-process transactions that are not widely shopped to institutional buyers.

The fund principally targets stabilized, cash-flowing senior-housing communities through acquisitions and recapitalizations. It will selectively participate in ground-up development when structured alongside experienced operating partners and pre-leased to operators from Ziegler's existing client network, though development exposure has represented a minority of total deployment.

The fund is structured to pool capital from institutional investors, including family offices, endowments, and insurance companies. For larger acquisitions, the manager structures co-investment vehicles that allow limited partners to scale exposure alongside the main fund, though these are syndicated on a deal-by-deal basis rather than through a standing club structure.

The fund concentrates on Sun Belt and Midwest markets where demographic growth and an aging population support long-term demand for private-pay senior housing. Known exposure includes Florida, Texas, and the upper Midwest, with a focus on suburban submarkets that face limited new supply pipeline and strong local operator presence.