Evergreen nursing home sold for $8.2 million

A Chicago-based business says it will not change management of the Carson City nursing home it now owns.

Aviv Asset Management bought the Evergreen Mountain View Health and Rehabilitation Center building at 201 Koontz Lane for $8.2 million from Evergreen's parent company, Vancouver, Wash.,-based Evergreen Healthcare.

Carson City recorded the sale Wednesday.

Evergreen took over management of the 146-bed nursing home in 2002. It bought the building for $5 million in 2005, according to city records.

Josh Kocheck, asset director for Aviv, said Aviv is a real estate business and will serve only as a landlord. He said people are concerned when a nursing home gets a new owner, but Aviv has no intentions of running a healthcare company.

"I think it should be business as usual," he said.

Evergreen Healthcare runs other nursing homes on North Ormsby Boulevard and in Gardnerville, Ely and Pahrump. It has 58 nursing homes concentrated in Western states.

Aviv owns about 125 nursing homes across the country, according to the company.

Evergreen Healthcare did not return calls or e-mails for comment Friday.

Evergreen Mountain View has had several problems with government agencies since its parent company started managing it.

It was the only nursing home in the state that made the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services list of 131 worst nursing homes last year. As a "special focus facility," the state checked the nursing home twice a year rather than the usual once a year from 2004 to 2008.

The nursing home made the list because it did not meet federal health and safety regulations, according to the Nevada Health Care Quality and Compliance Bureau.

The Nevada Attorney General's Fraud Control Unit investigated the nursing home's records in 2004, the health compliance bureau investigated the death of an 87-year-old man in 2003 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the nursing home for the deaths of six patients that year from flu-like symptoms.