Data at a Glance:

  • 930,636 square feet: The largest medical office space pipeline, under construction in Houston at the start of the year
  • 19.9%: Atlanta’s MOB market expansion throughout the last decade — the fastest-growing large market nationally by percentage
  • 520,000 square feet: The largest medical office property scheduled for 2025 completion — the Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick, N.J.

The real estate segment of medical office buildings or medical outpatient buildings (MOBs) remains well-positioned to benefit from trends that sustain the demand for U.S. health care real estate in 2025. Of course, at the top of the list is the aging population with senior citizens (age 65+) estimated to make up 20% of the country by 2030. Consequently, outpatient health care spending is expected to increase to nearly $2 trillion in that time.

What’s more, as advancing technology increasingly supports clinical care that doesn’t require a hospital stay, the health care real estate sector can evolve to increase the presence of state-of-the art ambulatory medical centers in community settings. At the same time, this will create a more convenient experience for both patients and caregivers.

So, gauging the state of health care real estate development in the U.S. at the start of the year, we looked at current market sizes and construction pipelines of MOBs larger than 25,000 square feet across the country and distilled the data into the four following sections:

  • The top 10 markets with the most medical office space currently under construction
  • The 10-year growth of the 10 largest MOB markets in the U.S.
  • The 20 largest MOBs scheduled for completion in 2025
  • The 20 largest medical office projects completed last year

Houston & Chicago Race to Top of Chart for Medical Office Space Under Construction

While none of the markets we surveyed exceeded 1 million square feet under construction at the start of this year, two (Houston and Chicago) come quite close to that threshold and stand out for having the most medical space underway. Meanwhile, the Miami and Manhattan pipelines represent the top markets in terms of expansion as a percentage of stock.

 

Houston was home to the largest MOB pipeline with 931,000 square feet under construction in January to place narrowly ahead of Chicago in the lead. The square footage in development here represented an expansion of just under 3% of stock, which is not surprising for what has grown to be the second-largest medical office space market in the country.

Plus, according to a recent health care real estate outlook report published by CBRE, Houston has also been consistently one of the top U.S. MOB markets for absorption in recent years. The same report also placed the southeast Texas powerhouse among the markets that have the largest pipelines of new medical construction in smaller facilities in the outer suburbs.

Following closely in second place, Chicago had 920,000 square feet of medical space in development in January 2025, which represented a market expansion of 3.2% of stock. Notably, the Windy City was reportedly one of the U.S. markets to enjoy the benefits of last year’s increase in sales of MOBs: Per the Chicago Business Journal, the city started off strong with a nearly 34% year-over-year increase in the sales of local patient care buildings outside of hospitals in the first half of 2024 alone.

New Jersey closes out the podium in third place with a medical office space pipeline of nearly 900,000 square feet. In terms of market expansion, this represented nearly 5% of stock to place the market ahead of Chicago and Houston for growth in this respect. Additionally, recent medical office space leasing and sales deals show strong continued interest in the New Jersey health care real estate market. As such, competition for MOB space might tighten going forward.

Further south, Miami started the year with roughly 841,000 square feet of space in development, granting the Florida entry fourth place on the list of fastest-growing markets for medical space. Here, the under-construction pipeline represented nearly 10% of stock and made Miami one of only two markets in this top 10 to preview a market expansion larger than 9%.

Meanwhile, Manhattan had the fifth-most medical office space under construction with 600,000 square feet in development in January. It’s worth noting here that this represented an MOB market expansion of 9.3%, which placed Manhattan closely behind Miami for growth as a percent of stock. Granted, the New York outpatient real estate market has enjoyed successful growth largely due to the network of academic medical centers expanding and evolving here, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Columbia University Medical Center, Weill Cornell, and NYU Langone.

LA Development Lags as Southern U.S. Markets Catch Up in Impressive 10-Year Growth

The country’s largest medical office market — Los Angeles — remained comparatively slow in terms of growth in recent years, while southern markets like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta have been hard at work catching up. See the graph and table below for a detailed breakdown of growth in terms of square footage and percentage for the 10 largest medical office markets throughout the last decade.

Houston added the most MOB square footage from 2015 through 2024 (5 million), while Atlanta was the market to show the largest percentage growth (nearly 20%). Similarly, by the end of 2024, Los Angeles added roughly 1.6 million square feet of medical office space to its 2015 total of about 36 million square feet — a modest 4.5% 10-year growth — compared to the other nine major MOB markets in this group.

More precisely, in 2024, Houston was home to nearly 32 million square feet of medical outpatient space, which was roughly 5.6 million square feet behind Los Angeles — a significantly smaller gap than the nearly 9 million square feet between them in 2015.

Not far behind, Dallas was the third-largest MOB market in the U.S. in 2024, totaling a little more than 29 million square feet across properties 25,000 square feet or larger. The sprawling north Texas market grew at a similar rate to Houston from 2015 through last year: It added roughly 4.3 million square feet during that time, which marked a 17.3% growth during the last decade.

To the north, Chicago wrapped up 2024 as the fourth-largest medical office market following 13% growth in 10 years. Developers hard at work here delivered 3.3 million square feet of medical outpatient space from 2015 through 2024. This brought the total up to nearly 29 million square feet of MOBs, which represented a little more than 8% of the local office market.

Then, Washington, D.C. trailed a little further behind as the fifth-largest medical office space market in the country at the close of 2024. Specifically, the MOB segment incorporated roughly 22 million square feet and accounted for a little more than 5% of total office space in the capital after a 10-year growth of 9.2% or nearly 2 million square feet from 2015 through 2024.

At the same time, Atlanta was a very close sixth in terms of total medical outpatient space in 2024, although it had a different growth trend than D.C. throughout the 10 years we referenced: The Georgia market added about 3.7 million square feet to the 18.5 million it had in 2015, which amounted to a nearly 20% expansion during the same decade.

New Jersey, Manhattan & Miami Home to Largest MOB Projects Coming Due in 2025

Totaling 520,000 square feet, the Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center project in New Brunswick, N.J., is the largest medical office space development scheduled for completion this year. This accounted for roughly 58% of the New Jersey MOB pipeline at the start of the year.

Looking at the 20 largest MOBs due for delivery in 2025, one other New Jersey development also made the cut: The Ambulatory Medical Pavilion of the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) is reportedly just weeks away from completion. When it opens, it will offer more than 226,000 square feet of state-of-the-art outpatient facilities across 15 stories.

The second-largest medical development scheduled to come online this year (400,000 square feet) is located in Manhattan, N.Y. Extell Development’s 30-story medical office building at 403 E. 59th St./1522 First Ave. on the Upper East Side topped out in the first half of 2024 and is almost ready to open its doors.

The nearly 450-foot-tall tower will be home to a new Hospital for Special Surgery facility spanning eight floors of physician offices and ancillary services for the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions. The building will also include space for offices of the Department of Health, as well as ambulatory care and surgical facilities.

Next, with an expected completion in Q3 2025 and incorporating 363,000 square feet of primarily medical office space, the University of Miami Health Medical Center at SoLé Mia is the third-largest MOB project due this year. Located within a 184-acre, mixed-use development in North Miami, UHealth SoLé Mia was designed to expand services and bring academic medicine closer to where people live, work, and play.

Not to be outdone, one other Miami medical office project — the Irma and Norman Braman Comprehensive Cancer Center — also stood out among the 20 largest deliveries slated for 2025. Located on Mount Sinai’s Miami Beach campus, the 220,000-square-foot facility is currently scheduled for completion in Q4. It promises to offer advanced, patient-centric cancer care and support services in collaboration with Columbia University.

Largest MOB Projects of 2024 Delivered in Madison, Wis.; Philadelphia; & Albany, N.Y.

Madison, Wis., was home to last year’s largest medical office project completion — the 475,000-square-foot Eastpark Medical Center, which is the newest property within the  University of Wisconsin – Madison’s health system to integrate research of new therapies and treatments directly into patient care. The highly modern medical facility was designed to offer a coordinated care model and brought experts in cancer, cardiology, neurology, pain management, and more in one place for enhanced, patient-centric convenience.

Jefferson Health’s Honickman Center in Philadelphia was the second-largest medical outpatient building to be delivered in 2024. Here, the advanced technology facility incorporates 462,000 square feet across 19 stories and was developed in partnership with National Real Estate Development and Ennead Architects.

Finally, the Albany, N.Y., MOB market welcomed what was last year’s third-largest medical office completion — Community Care Physicians’ and CDPHP’s 263,000-square-foot medical arts complex named Wellness Way. Located in Latham, N.Y., it opened its doors in the summer of 2024 with a large multispecialty practice and a reputable insurance company coming together under one roof.

Methodology

All property and market data is courtesy of CommercialEdge. Individual building data and market stats were extracted on January 28, 2025, and are subject to change. For the purposes of data accuracy, only medical office buildings or mixed-use buildings containing medical office space larger than 25,000 square feet were included.

The list of largest medical office building completions in 2024 includes properties that have already been completed as of the publication of this article. While CommercialEdge attempts to ensure the accuracy of projected completion dates, final completion and opening dates may differ.