NASHVILLE—Because the healthcare real estate sector is so new—a couple of decades old at most—it includes professionals among its active ranks who can be considered “pioneers” of the asset class.

One of those pioneers was honored at the recent 2014 BOMA International Medical Office Building + Healthcare Facilities Conference in Nashville. Garnering the first Outstanding Contribution Award was Jonathan L. “John” Winer, executive VP and chief investment officer of White Plains, NY-based Seavest Healthcare Properties Inc.

Presenting the award were the conference co-chairs, Laca Wong-Hammond, senior VP at Raymond James, and Neil J. Carolan, senior VP of development for Rendina Cos.

“Healthcare real estate is quite a specialized, niche industry, but as some of you know the sector came into favor some dozen years ago,” she said before calling Winer to the stage. “Before that, healthcare real estate was more of an alternative investment rather than a core real estate asset class. A few pioneers have built the industry, and even fewer can lay claim to (leading) … the sector's evolution from an investment, development, advisory and financing standpoint. We'd like to honor one of these pioneers today: Mr. John Winer.”

In an interview about his career, Winer relayed that he was in the right place at the right time while working for Ernst & Young LLP.

“As a consulting firm, we were always looking for ways in which we could help our clients, and that included hospitals, identify opportunities,” Winer recalled of his days at Ernst & Young. “We had done these same types of evaluations and transactions, looking at the value locked up in real estate, for corporations, and that's where the methodology came from to look at monetizing medical office buildings on the healthcare side.”

At the time, however, there were only a “handful or so” of institutional-quality capital sources interesting in investing in medical office buildings, Winer said.

But Winer quickly realized the potential of healthcare real estate. “As we started getting involved in monetizing assets, or finding developers for health systems, what I remember thinking was how incredibly underserved the sector was and how there were so few people and companies focused on helping hospitals understand what they owned and what the possibilities were.”

While still at Ernst & Young, Winer eventually made the shift to focusing all of his attention on health system clients. Seavest, which had long invested capital in healthcare development projects, hired him in 2008. At the time, Seavest was looking to raise its public profile and bolster its growth.

When Winer came on board, Seavest was making investments through its second private equity fund and raising capital for its third. Today, Seavest has fully invested the capital from that third fund and is raising capital for and making investments – both in new developments and facility purchases – from Seavest Properties IV.