Mainstreet Property Group cuts 7 percent of workforce

Mainstreet Property Group, one of the fastest-growing companies in central Indiana, specializing in building senior care facilities, has dismissed 10 people, or about 7 percent of its workforce.

CEO Zeke Turner said the cuts were for performance and reallocation reasons and not due to any financial issues at the Carmel-based company.

They took place March 29, just one day after the company announced nine hirings on its website.

The positions were spread across the company and did not include any executives, Turner said.

“We sometimes get good people that maybe just aren’t in the right position or the right place,” Turner said. “Sometimes people don’t do everything they’re supposed to do. … Occasionally, we have to hold people accountable.”

He said the terminations were due to “mostly accountability in terms of work performance and a couple of reallocations to make sure we have the right resources in the right place.”

Mainstreet is a private investment holding company that runs six health care-related businesses, including a developer of “post-acute-care” facilities, which focus on short stays by older patients after they leave the hospital but before they are ready to go home. The company does not offer long-term nursing care.

The company now has about 130 employees and is still hiring, Turner said. The company has been in an aggressive expansion mode for more than two years.

“I think if you look at the job boards, there are still quite a few positions posted for us,” he said. “We want to hire good, talented people and we continue to interview and bring on people that we think can make us successful.”

In recent years, the company has upset Indiana's nursing-home industry with its aggressive push to open new facilities near established nursing homes.

Existing operators of long-term-care facilities have pushed back hard against Mainstreet’s building and nearly persuaded the Legislature to halt all new construction of long-term-care facilities in 2014.

Turner’s father, Eric Turner, later resigned his seat in the Indiana House of Representatives after privately lobbying against a bill calling for the nursing home construction moratorium that might have cost Mainstreet millions of dollars in revenue. Eric Turner had earned nearly $8 million in the nursing homes in the previous two years, and had millions more on the line. Eric Turner was 50-percent owner of Mainstreet Capital Partners, which owns nearly 76.5 percent of Mainstreet Property Group.

Last year, the Legislature finally passed a three-year moratorium on construction of most new nursing homes around Indiana. Supporters said the moratorium was needed because Indiana has thousands of unused nursing home beds.

Mainstreet has built dozens of facilities in numerous states. The company expects to ring up revenue of more than $400 million this year, up from about $66 million in 2013, Turner said.

Mainstreet is in the process of completing a $302.5 million reverse takeover of a Canadian long-term care company, Kingsway Arms Retirement Inc., that will give it a publicly traded investment firm to help finance its development projects.

The deal would put Turner and his management team in charge of Kingsway, which would change its name to Mainstreet Health Investments.

John Russell can be reached at (317) 472-5383 or jrussell@ibj.com. He can also be reached on Twitter @johnrussell99.