(This interview was conducted by Healthcare Real Estate InsightsTM
and is provided special to GlobeSt.com.)

KNOXVILLE, TN—As a 30-year veteran of commercial real estate, Scott D. Evans of Realty Trust Group LLC (RTG) began focusing exclusively on the healthcare real estate sector in 1997. He was working at Ernst & Young at the time and during his 17 years there co-led the firm's national HRE advisory business with Jonathan L. “John” Winer, who is now with Seavest Healthcare Properties.

After that tenure, Evans became a managing director in the real estate practice at New York-based Cain Brothers & Company LLC before joining RTG, which advises a number of large healthcare systems. The firm's president is Greg Gheen.

This is the second part of Healthcare Real Estate Insights' interview with Evans. You can read the first part by clicking here. 

HREI: Go ahead and explain the range of services that Realty Trust Group provides to your clients. And what type of clients do you find yourself providing services to? 

Evans: RTG is a healthcare real estate advisory and services firm and we work hard to understand our clients' needs and provide them our best professional objective advice. We also have the full capability to implement any solution we would recommend, or step away if a client has an established relationship that they would prefer to use on implementation. We have a very broad service delivery platform that we can bring together for a client, including strategic campus and facility planning, portfolio optimization, project management, property/asset management, site analysis and acquisition, portfolio monetization, new project development and fair market value opinions. The vast majority of our clients are hospitals, health systems and physician groups.

HREI: In today's ultra-competitive healthcare landscape, what are you seeing as the most important real estate needs of the health systems?

Evans: I really feel like having an objective advisor who can help reduce costs and create value for a health system's real estate operations is incredibly important for a health system. The senior management team in a typical health system generally does not have much real estate experience, so they need a partner they can trust and rely on. There frankly aren't that many firms which operate like ours, and I believe our approach has been one of the main reasons for the growth we've experienced the last few years.

HREI: As far as you see it, what do third-party healthcare real estate firms, be they developers or investor/buyers of existing space, need to do most to be relevant to the country's health systems? Do you see a need for third-party ownership of healthcare properties moving forward?

Evans: I think all service providers need to be educated on the business of healthcare and understand the nature of the stakeholders involved in a given health system to truly be relevant to their clients. Healthcare is a unique industry, and what may work in other real estate sectors may not work in healthcare. I do believe that third-party ownership of healthcare property will be needed in the future, it just depends on the specific issues associated with the hospital and the property. The strategies, cultures and capital needs for hospitals vary significantly around the country, so it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all industry.

John B. Mugford is the editor 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.