LOUISVILLE, KY—Kindred Healthcare Inc. said Thursday evening it had closed on the first tranche of the sale of its skilled nursing business to a joint venture led by affiliates of BlueMountain Capital Management. The sale of 54 skilled nursing facilities, including 22 leased from Ventas Inc., brought sale proceeds of about $519 million, and Kindred paid $488 million to Ventas for those 22 properties.

In all, the $910-million sale to the BlueMountain group, first announced this past June, encompasses 89 nursing centers and seven assisted living facilities, including 36 leased from Ventas. Kindred has agreed to pay Ventas a total of $700 million for the real estate it has leased from the Chicago-based healthcare REIT.

“We believe that the sale of our nursing facility operations will significantly enhance shareholder value, focus our attention to our higher margin and faster growing businesses and advance our efforts to transform Kindred's strategy,” says Benjamin A. Breier, Kindred's president and CEO. When the sale to the BlueMountain JV was announced this past June, Breier commented that “exiting the skilled nursing facility business, in its entirety, has been a long-stated goal of our enterprise.” Kindered expects to complete the sale to the JV by year's end.

At Ventas, chairman and CEO Debra A. Cafaro says her company is continuing “to deemphasize our SNF business in a profitable way.” Following the sale of all 36 Kindred-leased SNFs, only 1% of Ventas' aggregate NOI will come from the skilled-nursing segment of its business. In 2015, Ventas spun off its SNF platform into a separate, publicly traded REIT, Care Capital Properties, which last month completed a merger with Sabra Health Care Properties.