MOB Trades, This Time at Six-and-a-Quarter Cap

LANHAM, MD-The days when medical office buildings rarely came to market are, for the moment at least, over. Three weeks after the Anne Arundel Medical Center - Bowie Gateway, in Bowie, MD  traded for $10.4 million and at a seven-and-a-quarter cap rate, two institutional investors have acquired a 64,261-square foot medical office building on campus at Doctors Community Hospital here for $23 million and a six-and-a-quarter cap rate. Furthermore, lead MOB broker for the area, NorthMarq’s Jim Kornick, tells GlobeSt.com that he is getting ready to list another medical office building in the Baltimore area within the next two weeks.

The buyers of the Prince George’s County office, Heitman LLC and NexCore Group LP, faced stiff competition for the deal, according to Kornick. “There were 15 institutional competitors and multiple rounds,” he says. “We interviewed five prospects and then narrowed it to two.” NorthMarq’s Matt Clinebell also brokered the transaction. The four-story building, known as the Professional Office Building, was developed by the hospital in 2009. Tenants include a full service imaging with mammography center, a cancer treatment center, multiple cancer-related practices, cardiology and one of the area’s largest hospital-owned multi-specialty practices.

The Heitman-NexCore team has completed a combined transaction volume of over $150 million, and is in the process of vetting additional deals in the DC area, NexCore chief investment officer Peter Kloepfer, tells GlobeSt.com. “We have a good sense of the elements that make a project work, such as a relationship with a hospital, strong referral patterns,” he says. “This building met all those criteria.” The company acquires such properties with a long-term hold in mind.

Kloepfer confirmed the six-and-a-quarter cap rate for the deal. Cap rates have been steadily dropping and increasingly buyers and brokers are reluctant to reveal them. Kornick, for example, declined to discuss the cap rate for this transaction, other than to say it was among the lowest of any medical office sale this cycle in the US. He added that “the only one that is remotely comparable occurred in Charlotte, NC recently.”