An Arizona real estate company that embarked on an aggressive acquisition campaign along the East Coast this year recently closed on its purchase of the five-building Westchester Medical Campus on Westchester Avenue.
Healthcare Trust of America Inc., a publicly traded real estate investment trust in Scottsdale, Ariz., recently announced that its purchase of the 188,500-square-foot complex of medical buildings in West Harrison was part of approximately $89 million in deals on which it closed in August. The East Coast acquisitions also included a 69,000-square-foot medical building in Charleston, S.C.
The approximately 14-acre Westchester Medical Campus includes buildings at 220-244 Westchester Ave. Previous owners had gained municipal approval to build a sixth building on the site, a four-story, approximately 71,900-square-foot building.
Executives at Healthcare Trust of America did not respond to requests for comment on the purchase price and other details of the Harrison deal, the company”™s first venture in the Westchester market. The company in a press release noted the property “is part of a high-traffic regional medical corridor” in one of the wealthiest counties in the country and adjoins the $128.8-million Memorial Sloan Kettering West Harrison outpatient cancer center slated to open in October.
The seller, Florida-based ProMed Properties Inc., in 2008 paid $53.3 million to acquire the medical office building complex from RPW Group Inc. in Rye Brook. ProMed, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Israeli real estate company Gazit-Globe Ltd., in June closed on the $200 million sale to Healthcare Trust of America of medical office buildings totaling 444,000 square feet of space in Boston, Baltimore and Miami.
Healthcare Trust officers in their announcement of the recent Harrison and Charleston deals said the purchases increased the company”™s total investment activity this year to approximately $300 million, amounting to an approximately 10 percent portfolio growth rate.
Since its start in 2006, the real estate investment trust has spent about $3.3 billion to build a medical office building portfolio composed of about 14.9 million square feet of space in 27 states. In New York, the company owns and operates a 77,000-square-foot medical office building on the campus of the former St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, now the Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital of Westchester Medical Center, and Putnam Center, a 90,000-square-foot facility in Carmel. Its largest New York holdings are in Albany, where it operates eight medical office buildings totaling 879,000 square feet of space.
