Shankh Mitra
Chief Executive Officer at Welltower
Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. I'll review second quarter business trends and our capital allocation priorities. John will provide an update on operational performance for our senior housing and medical office portfolios. Nikhil will give you an update on investment landscape and Tim will walk you through our triple-net businesses, balance sheet highlights and guidance updates.
We're very pleased to report another quarter of significant bottom line growth with normalized FFO per share up 17% year-over-year or over 19% adjusted for prior-year subsidies. Quarter was once again led by our senior housing portfolio, but with notable contributions from all other areas of the business, including investments. Last night, we announced another $1 billion of acquisitions under contract since our last update at NAREIT conference in June, bringing our acquisition activity to approximately $5 billion year-to-date. There continues to be no duct of capital deployment opportunities in front of us at extraordinarily attractive economics which I'll get into shortly. Ultimately, we're pleased to once again be able to raise our full year FFO per share guidance as we continue to capitalize on the unprecedented internal and external growth opportunity in senior housing.
Before John goes into details, I wanted to first provide some high level thoughts on the senior housing business and why we remain as optimistic as ever about its future prospects. This quarter marks the seventh consecutive quarter in which our SHO portfolio has posted same store NOI growth in excess of 20%. A truly remarkable feat. There is no toward the bottom line growth was once again fueled by -- fueled through the combination of strong revenue growth and moderating expense. RevPOR or unit revenue growth came in at 5.3%, while ExpPOR or unit expense growth was up just 1%. A near record low for the Company.
What matters to us though, is that Delta between the two. Which is ultimately what drives the bottom line. As we have elaborated in the past, our focus is not on the absolute level of RevPOR or ExpPOR growth. This difference is what we are focused on, and it remains historically high levels as shown on Slide 18 of our business update presentation, resulted in an another quarter of substantial margin expansion of 290 basis points year-over-year to 27.3%. While margin remains well below pre-COVID levels, I would note that we have made significant progress since hitting the trough levels of profitability in 2021. While -- with farther upside remaining through the scaling benefits achieved through higher occupancy,, aka operating leverage. And as the operating platform begins to bear fruit.
Overall, while we are pleased with the results we achieved this quarter, what we are much more excited about is the fundamental backdrop is parsed [Phonetic] to dramatically improve as we look forward to '25 and beyond. It starts with end market demand. Baby boomers are just entering their 80s and pickup in demand, which we have recently witnessed will only intensify going forward. Not only is the 80-plus population growing at a fastest clip in decades. But what's even more compelling is that growth of this group of seniors will accelerate to 5% to 7% per annum as we close out the decade, driving demand even higher, and there is plummeting new supply.
The second quarter construction starts for once again negligible, falling well below trough levels seen even during GFC. It remains extraordinarily challenging to secure construction financing as regional banks that served as the most prolific lender to the sector in previous cycles has effectively shut down all activities. And despite the attractive growth prospect of our industry, most developers have thrown in the towel due to a lack of development economics. We think this will continue as returns or should I say lack that of were made on other people's money no longer available as investors lick their wounds from the last cycle.
While the beta of the Senior Housing business remains extraordinarily attractive, what truly sets us apart are our efforts to generate outsized alpha for our existing owners. This is reflected by the difficult but important steps that we continue to take to farther amplify our long-term growth trajectory. This not only includes the buildout of our operating platform, which John will get into in a minute, but also involves numerous capital light transaction such as operator transitions, conversion -- and conversion of triple-net and to RIDEA lease structures.
We are confident that several operating platform initiatives will start to impact occupancy and NOI next year. Expanding on the theme of enhancing long-term growth through capitalized transactions, we announced transition of 89 Holiday by Atria assets to six Welltower's strongest operating partners with deep expertise and local scale in their regions. We have experienced tremendous success, with hundreds of transition who have effectuated in recent years and we expect similar outcomes from this most recent set of assets.
More importantly, we hope to achieve over $70 million of additional NOI upside where new operators stabilize these properties. And separately, we converted or agreed to convert 47 triple-net lease properties to RIDEA structure in Q2, allowing us to directly participate in substantial growth of these properties that are poised to deliver in coming years. This was achieved in four different transactions, primarily with existing RIDEA operators that are growing with including StoryPoint and new perspective. These actions come with some short-term dilution, but we are confident that we will substantially enhance our growth in the backoff of '25 and '26 assuming we only get to toward 92% occupancy, we should achieve approximately $40 million of NOI post stabilization from today's level.
To illustrate that in new investment terms, you need $2 billion of new acquisitions to achieve. That level of NOI accretion, assuming 2% long-term accretion of our investment model. That's how impactful the math is for our near to medium term growth. And clearly, our owners will capture all the upside from stabilization of this asset, which should enhance our long-term earnings growth trajectory as well.
Turning to investment activity, last night we announced additional investment activity that brings us to nearly $5 billion of transactions closed or under contract to close year-to-date. The US and UK comprised of the bulk of our recent transaction with virtually all transaction being completed in senior housing space. Our investment teams remain busy as ever as the opportunity to acquire senior housing assets continue to expand. Largely from resulted of the broken capital structure and other debt-driven situations that Nikhil described on last call. Notably, while '23 was a record year for us with $5 billion of investment, we have achieved this level of transaction activity in just first seven months of 2024.
Our pipeline beyond these transactions remain robust visible, granular and actionable. Lastly, I would like to comment Tim and our capital markets team for their efforts to further strengthen our balance sheet. Through the tactical capitalization of acquisitions coupled with dramatic rise in cash flow. our balance sheet leverage has declined to 3.68 times, another record low for the Company. This balance sheet enhancement was recognized by Moody's and S&P, with both rating agencies revising our credit rating outlook to positive during the quarter. And yesterday, we announced the recast and upsides of our revolving trade facility to $5 billion bringing near-term liquidity to nearly $9 billion.
Our new revolver comes at an improved pricing and extended term relative to our previous facility, a testament to the strengthening of our credit profile and growth outlook of our business even in this challenging times for real estate credit. We will remain disciplined in our funding of our future opportunities, but as I have previously mentioned, we have created significant debt capacity to tap into creating another lever for us to further augment our earnings growth. With that, I'll pass it over to John.
