Ventas Purchase Marks a First

Parkside at Legacy. Image courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

Ventas Inc. has paid $58 million for a 101,608-square-foot medical office building in Plano, Texas, its first investment in an inpatient behavioral health facility. Cushman & Wakefield assisted the seller, Cawley Partners, in the disposition of the fully leased, single-tenant property dubbed Parkside at Legacy.

Developed by VanTrust Real Estate as a speculative office project, the three-story building came online in 2016 at 5120 Legacy Drive, within the 2,665-acre Legacy business park. Cawley Partners acquired the vacant property in 2018 and secured Denver-based Eating Recovery Center as the facility’s sole tenant, investing more than $22 million in landlord and tenant improvements.

ERC committed to an 18-year lease at the building, opening its largest Texas center in 2020. The facility houses both inpatient and outpatient services related to the treatment of eating disorders, from medical and psychiatric supervision to treatment for co-occurring illnesses.

Parkside at Legacy is roughly 23 miles north of downtown Dallas in the Platinum Corridor North submarket. The area’s health-care providers also include Children’s Medical Center Plano and LifeCare Hospital Plano.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Travis Ives and Gino Lollio, together with other members of the firm’s Healthcare Advisory Group, represented Cawley Partners. Lollio said, in a prepared statement, that experienced investors are starting to look outside the typical MOB box toward emerging micro-niches in a health-care real estate market where yields continue to compress.

According to CommercialEdge data, Parkside at Legacy is one of only two medical office buildings that have changed hands in Platinum Corridor North since the beginning of the year. The submarket’s inventory accounts for more than 5.2 million square feet across 60 properties.

Ventas transaction activity

Ventas has had a busy transaction agenda in the past 12 months, aided in part by the $2.75 billion unsecured credit facility it obtained in February. Continuing to focus on senior living communities and life science properties, as well as on medical office buildings and outpatient facilities, the REIT has been both selling and buying a variety of assets from coast to coast.

In September, Ventas sold a two-building medical office portfolio totaling 285,463 square feet in Colorado Springs, Colo. The assets were 72 percent leased at the time of sale, with University of Colorado Health as anchor tenant.

The deal came on the heels of the $2.3 billion acquisition of New Senior Investment Group Inc. The all-stock transaction added 103 senior housing properties to Ventas’ portfolio.