Transactions: Hammes Partners closes on sale of 23-MOB portfolio

Buyer is likely Welltower, which announced a similar, pending deal in October

BROOKFIELD, Wis. — It looks as if the 2018 medical office building (MOB) sales market is going to close with two big portfolio transactions.

Last week, Brookfield-based Hammes Partners completed the sale of a large MOB package that it put on the market in April of this year. The sale comes on the heels of a Nov. 30 announcement that the18-building MMRE portfolio also offered in April by Nashville, Tenn.-based Montecito Medical Real Estate had sold as well.

As for the sale of the Hammes Medical Office Portfolio, the Healthcare Capital Markets Group with Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (NYSE: JLL), which represented Hammes Partners, announced last week that a buyer, which it did not name, had closed on the purchase of the 23-property, Class A” MOB portfolio with 979,000 rentable square feet of space. The MOBs are in 12 major metropolitan markets, according to JLL.

HREI is making an educated speculation, with confirmation by at least one HRE professional not associated with the deal, that the buyer is the healthcare REIT Welltower. We are doing so in part because, as noted in the article above, Welltower’s CEO announced during an Oct. 30 earnings call with analysts that the publicly traded REIT had entered an agreement to acquire 23 MOBs for a price of “about $400 million.”

During the earnings call, Welltower’s CEO said the facilities in the portfolio are “affiliated with major high-quality healthcare systems (and have) an average age of 10 years.”

The portfolio was accumulated in recent years by Hammes Partners I and II, funds managed by well-known, 27-year-old healthcare development firm Hammes Company, based in Brookfield.

Back in April, when JLL announced that it was marketing the Hammes Medical Office Portfolio, executives on the team said a number of the buildings are in top 15 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia and Houston. JLL noted at that time that the portfolio was 93 percent occupied, with “direct leasing of 54 percent (of the portfolio) by notable and highly-rated health systems, as well as highly-prized specialist physician groups.”

For more information, please visit HREInsights.com.

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