NEWTON, MA-As far as Senior Housing Properties Trust is concerned, it is receiving “good interest” from potential investors for a seven-building, 831,499 square foot medical office building portfolio it has been marketing during the past few months. In July the healthcare real estate investment trust disclosed it planned to sell the healthcare real estate, along with 11 senior living communities with 856 units.

The decision to sell came after the REIT's officials took “an aggressive look at our portfolio.”

David Hegarty, the president and chief operating officer, said in July during the REIT's Q2 earnings conference call that the “11 senior living communities consist of seven skilled nursing facilities and four assisted living communities and have an aggregate net book value of $15.5 million. The seven medical office buildings were 99.3 percent occupied with a weighted average remaining lease term of one year.”

While the specific “underperforming” properties offered for sale were not identified, the REIT has since reported that the healthcare real estate houses both medical and bioscience tenants.

Asked why the REIT was selling the portfolio, Hegarty said one of the bioscience tenants was being impacted by the new medical devices tax, and that some of the other bio tenants were being affected by industry consolidation. “So it's going to be very difficult for us to re-lease this property without a lot of capital improvements,” he said.

In another market, the healthcare real etate portfolio is being affected by the fact that a health system is building its own campus in another location and, presumably, some current SNH tenants will be relocating to that new campus.

This month, SNH announced that one of the 11 senior living facilities had been sold during Q3.

Also, during the Q3 earnings conference call, Hegarty provided a further update, saying SNH had “a good amount of interest” in both the MOBs and the 10 remaining senior living properties. He said the sale of some of the senior living properties could close before the end of this year, while the sales of the medical office buidlings are more likely to extend into Q1 2014.

As of Sept. 30, Senior Housing Properties Trust had healthcare real estate portfolio consisting of 116 multi-tenant buildings totaling more than 7.8 million square feet.

Murray W. Wolf  is the Founder and Publisher of Healthcare Real Estate Insights™, the nation's first and only publication totally dedicated to covering news and trends in healthcare real estate development, financing and investment. For more information, please visit www.HREInsights.com.