J. Justin Hutchens
Executive Vice President, Senior Housing and Chief Investment Officer at Ventas
Thank you, Debbie.
I'm happy to report on another good quarter for our SHOP portfolio and another guidance raise led by occupancy. As Debbie mentioned, the macro backdrop is very supportive from a supply-demand standpoint. I'm pleased that part one of our strategy, which is to deliver profitable growth in senior housing is off to a good start as we are seeing very strong execution from our operators with support from our Ventas OI platform initiatives.
The key selling season is delivering strong results so far in May, June and July as leading indicators in occupancy are all performing really well, building on our best-in-class occupancy performance. I'd also like to highlight that our net move-in volume year-to-date was 13 times higher than last year, contributing to our outperformance, driven by our Atria and Holiday portfolios as well as Sinceri Priority Life and Discovery Senior Living.
The second quarter same-store SHOP revenue grew 8% and occupancy grew by 320 basis points led by the US with 380 basis points year-over-year and 90 basis points sequentially, leading to an absolute occupancy of 85.6%, led by Canada at almost 96% and an overall operating margin of 27.4%, all of which are industry-leading metrics. I'd like to spotlight Le Groupe Maurice, who operates full-service active adult communities for us in Quebec and represents nearly 60% of our NOI in Canada. They have consistently delivered stellar performance.
The 380 basis points of occupancy gains in the US was driven by broad-based performance across our portfolio with growth of 400 basis points in assisted living and 340 basis points in independent living year-over-year. Spot occupancy was particularly strong in our communities compared to the market. The US spot occupancy grew 450 basis points year-over-year in the top 99 markets, which is 200 basis points faster than the NIC average.
Furthermore, the US spot occupancy grew 150 basis points sequentially in the top 99 markets, almost three times faster than the NIC average. 88% of our total SHOP NOI is included in our same-store portfolio. We were pleased to achieve 8% revenue growth in our eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit NOI growth at 15.2% year-over-year. The spread between RevPOR growth at 4% and opex growth at 1% remains very healthy at about 300 basis points.
The key driver of value creation will continue to be occupancy growth due to the high operating leverage in the business. Margin expansion will increase as occupancy ticks higher and particularly in communities that are over 90% occupied. I'd like to thank our operating partners, there are too many to mention, as there are so many strong contributors taking great care of people and delivering excellent operating results.
Given the outperformance in the first half, we are happy to raise our full year guidance expectations again on our same-store SHOP portfolio by 50 basis points to 14.5% at the midpoint. Our average occupancy growth expectations have increased to about 280 basis points, up from 270. The remaining key assumptions that drive the midpoint of our range remain in line with what we previously communicated.
Now I'll give an update on our Ventas OI platform and initiatives. We continue to advance our Ventas operational Insights platform, which was formally launched in 2022. This platform is designed to drive outperformance in this multi-year occupancy growth opportunity and is the cornerstone of part one of our strategy, which is to drive organic growth in our SHOP portfolio. This platform enables us to combine our best-in-class analytics with our operating expertise to drive thoughtful conversations and actionable insights with the operators to quickly make informed decisions on critical areas of the business.
The increased availability of real-time data through systems and reporting automation have allowed our operating partners to benefit from key insights across a wide variety of initiatives. Our platform has enabled deep analysis into sales and price optimization, market positioning, targeted NOI-generating capex, and digital marketing to name a few. I'll cover some proof points on how we have driven occupancy and NOI with Ventas OI. I'll start with NOI-generating capex.
In assessing which communities receive refreshed capital investments, we analyze the community's position in the market and prioritize those where investment would most improve occupancy and rate relative to the competitive set. We further annualized overall market characteristics, including forward-looking net demand, home values, net worth, affordability among other data points to support our position that capital would drive robust NOI growth and generate outsized returns.
We have completed 215 projects since the start of this program in late 2022, of which 133 projects are at least six months post-project completion. This group has grown occupancy by over 530 basis points and outperformed their respective markets by 350 basis points of growth. RevPOR has also grown 6.5%, demonstrating the effectiveness of this redev program. Next, price-volume optimization. We continue to collaborate with operators on a monthly basis, monitoring street rate pricing on nearly all units in our US SHOP portfolio relative to our proprietary market data to ensure pricing is set to optimize move-ins.
Our automated monthly rent roll consolidation process enables us to efficiently analyze over 8 million rows of historical street rate pricing data to better understand market positioning and proactively identify price opportunities. We've executed this process and successfully optimized price and volume resulting in improved sales momentum through the second quarter across several operators, including Sunrise, Atria, Holiday and Priority Life Care. These operators have improved their move-in performance by 25%.
Next, digital marketing. We've also executed digital marketing initiatives focused on driving higher move-ins. Improving the attractiveness of the website to Google search, for instance, and user experience improvements have allowed potential residents and families to easily gather information to learn about the living, service and care options available in our communities. Our focus on digital marketing has produced double-digit improvement in move-ins derived from website referrals.
Summarizing Ventas OI, the tools we have created for our platform have enabled us to perform and continue delivering growth. As part of our OI engagements, over 1,000 of which we've completed since I started, we are proactively sharing insights, data and benchmarks with our operating partners to align on performance expectations.
Moving on to investments, where we are executing on part two of our strategy, which is to capture value-creating external growth focused on senior housing. We are in a unique period of time, the best I've seen in my career, where we have a combination of relatively high-yield and high-growth investment opportunities in senior housing, leading to very attractive unlevered IRRs. The sector is supported by tremendous demographic tailwinds.
In the second quarter, we continued our strong run of executing on attractive external growth opportunities. We closed approximately $300 million of value-creating investments in 12 senior housing communities, 10 of which are with existing Ventas operator relationships, bringing the year-to-date volume up to $350 million at a blended going-in yield greater than 8%. In addition to the accretive going-in yield, these investments are positioned squarely within our right market, right asset, right operator framework and now is the right time to invest in senior housing as this favorable positioning amplified by the unprecedented supply-demand backdrop will drive continued NOI growth resulting in unlevered IRRs in the low to mid-teens.
We also continue to invest in an extremely attractive basis below replacement costs with an average per unit purchase price of $250,000. Looking forward, our pipeline remains robust, filled with actionable opportunities with both existing and new operator relationships with a profile similar to the deals already closed in 2024. Specifically, we have line-of-sight to an incremental $400 million of senior housing investments, bringing the total 2024 senior housing investment volume to $750 million.
Additionally, we are deeply engaged in executing this high-priority of expanding our SHOP portfolio. We continue to underwrite a large and growing pipeline of attractive near-term opportunities and are confident in our ability to continue creating value via additional external growth going forward.
Now, I'll hand over to Bob.
