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Medical Office Commercial Real Estate Continues To Gain Strength

Any medical facility likes to hear about improving conditions. That’s exactly what medical office buildings are experiencing: improved fundamentals that make property owners, investors, and operators healthy.

Colliers has a Q3 2022 report on healthcare real estate that covers performance in the top 100 U.S. markets.

“Despite economic concerns and industry challenges, the medical office property sector (MOB) continues to go from strength to strength, setting record highs for asking rents, sales volume, and pricing over the past four quarters,” read the report’s overview. “Demand is outpacing supply, vacancy remains tight, and capitalization (cap) rates have remained relatively stable. As a result, development activity is gaining momentum, reflecting confidence in the sector.”

But it comes with a caveat: the healthcare industry they depend on isn’t feeling so rosy. Pricing pressures are under way, and MOB owners that could mean monitoring and potential course of treatment.

On the plus side, average vacancy in the top 100 metros in the first half of 2022 was 8%. That was 40 basis points below the same period the previous year. The top 10 markets ranging from 6.3% in Boston to Houston’s 12.3%.

Top 100 average Los Angeles had the highest net MOB asking rents at $36.85 per square foot. That was quite the outlier.

“However, none of the other top 10 metros have an average MOB rent higher than $30 per square foot,” the report said. “Boston and New York are the next highest at $26.26 per square foot and $26.19 per square foot, respectively.” Although numbers for the lowest prices in the top 10 didn’t appear, a graph clearly showed that four—Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Philadelphia—were significantly below the national average.

To try pacing demand, construction rose, with completions of 14 million square feet in the four quarters ending with Q2 2022. That was up from the 13.7 million square feet from the previous 12-month period. MOB under construction rose more sharply, from 30.9 million to 37.1 million square feet.

And investor demand was strong at $17.2 billion in the four quarters ending with Q2 2022, the highest on record. Though that was largely due to the last quarter of 2021, which according to an included graph stood far above other quarters.

MOB is largely in a position to weather economic storms, as medical care is something difficult for many people to forego. But practitioners are also eying costs.

“In the face of reduced income and, in some cases, operating losses, some providers are cutting staff despite an overall shortage of employees in the healthcare industry.”

That would suggest real estate overhead will also be under scrutiny.

As an increasing amount of MOB is taken up by larger organizations—hospitals, HMOs, and other big operators—lowering those costs are likely to be on their agendas, and they have fiscal muscle to negotiate hard.

 

Source: GlobeSt.

CIT Serves As Sole Lead Arranger On $48 Million Portfolio Financing Of Medical Office Buildings

CIT Group Inc. announced that its Healthcare Finance business served as sole lead arranger of senior debt financing aggregating $48 million for the acquisition of a portfolio of medical office buildings.

The borrower is a joint venture between Kayne Anderson Real Estate and Remedy Medical Properties. The portfolio properties are located in four states and collectively total more than 189,000 square feet. They include:

• The Bon Secours Medical Office Building  in Chesapeake, Virginia

• The Locust Grove Medical Center in Locust Grove, Georgia

• The Spectrum Medical Office Building in Gilbert, Arizona

• The Arizona Spine and Joint Medical Office Building in Mesa, Arizona

• The Plano Medical Office Building in Plano, Texas

“These medical office buildings are modern facilities in attractive locations, easily accessed by healthcare patients and providers,” said Peter Westmeyer, CEO, Remedy Medical Properties. “We are pleased to add these properties to our portfolio and appreciate CIT’s agility and expertise in arranging financing.”

“Kayne Anderson Real Estate and Remedy Medical Properties are well-known as leading investors in medical office buildings and other real estate,” said William Douglass, managing director and group head for CIT’s Healthcare Finance business. “We are excited to have expanded our relationship with the Kayne Anderson/Remedy joint venture through providing this very important acquisition debt financing.”

CIT’s Healthcare Finance unit, part of the Commercial Finance division, provides comprehensive financing and banking solutions to middle market healthcare companies across the U.S. By using a client-focused and industry-centric model, the Healthcare Finance team can tailor its products and services to help clients meet their needs for growth capital.

 

Source: PRNewswire

Dallas-Fort Worth Tops The Nation In Medical Office Building Development

Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) had the nation’s highest rate of medical office building (MOB) completions from Q3 2017 to Q2 2018, according to a new report from CBRE.

MOB construction deliveries totaled 954K SF during that period, with another 95K SF of medical space still under construction as of the last half of 2018.mob

“Even development that robust doesn’t add up to overbuilding, at least not yet,” according to CBRE Senior Vice President, Global Workplace Solutions Jordan Buis. “Although we’ve seen growth in DFW healthcare developments over the past decade, I believe the market is stable. We’ve seen healthy demand from tenants to keep up with the new supply, and developers aren’t overbuilding. The population boom in DFW is driving the need for new medical product, especially in the suburbs.”

The recent volume of deliveries continues a longer-term pattern of growth for the Metroplex, the report said. From Q1 2010 to Q2 2018, DFW delivered more than 2.7M SF of new medical office space, second only to the Houston market, which delivered in excess of 3.5M SF of MOB space in the same period.  Medical office rents in the Metroplex increased 2.1% from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018 to $27.43/SF, even as the vacancy rate rose 180 basis points to 23.3% over the same period.

“As rents continue to rise and reimbursements continue to decline for the healthcare providers, it will be interesting to see if there’s a point of inflection in the near future,” Buis said.

The surge of MOB development in the Metroplex comes as health systems nationally are increasingly turning to outpatient centers due to higher capital costs and a surge in high-deductible health plans requiring patients to pay larger out-of-pocket amounts.

The total number of outpatient centers nationwide grew more than 50% from 2005 to 2016 to about 41,000 properties, according to CBRE. Outpatient center employment has more than doubled since 2003, and grew 3.5% year over year in October 2018, compared with 2% annual growth in overall healthcare employment.

Medical City Frisco Expansion (PHOTO CREDIT: Medical City Frisco)

In DFW, the most recent example of outpatient development — though close to a traditional hospital — just broke ground at Medical City Frisco.   The facility will be a medical office building with an ambulatory surgery center totaling about 150K SF and connected to Medical City‘s main hospital by a skybridge. The development will include 11 operating rooms, 53 patient rooms and office space. The $37M project is expected to be complete by spring 2020,”

“The development is anticipating future demand for leading-edge medical treatment,” Medical City CEO Charles Gressle said in a statement.

Last year, the hospital expanded its women’s services unit, which includes 13 delivery and recovery rooms, and features a six-bed, Level II neonatal intensive care unit with three dedicated cesarean section operating rooms.

 

Source: Bisnow