New York investor pays $50M for Lee Health skilled nursing facility

Lee Health’s Gulf Coast Medical Center Skilled Nursing Unit has been sold to a New York investor.

The facility, which is at 13960 Plantation Road in Fort Myers, brought $49.7 million.

The health system is the only tenant in the facility and has 16 years remaining on its lease with options to extend, according to SRS Real Estate Partners’ National Net Lease Group, which represented the seller Plantation Medical Center SNU and announced the off-market sale.

The unnamed buyer was a private 1031 exchange investor.

The 75-bed, 57,650-square-foot nursing unit was built in 2018 and sits on 4.23 acres.

Lee Health, one of the largest community health systems in Florida, announced last year that it is building a new campus in Fort Myers, on 52 acres along Challenger Boulevard between Colonial Boulevard and Winkler Avenue. It will include 216 beds, 16 operating rooms, an emergency department with 30 emergency room bays and a 16-bed observation unit.

In January it relocated its Regional Trauma Center from Lee Memorial Hospital to Gulf Coast Medical Center. To prepare for the relocation, Gulf Coast Medical Center, which is adjacent to the nursing unit that just sold, underwent an extensive $315 million expansion project.

The expansion added 268 new inpatient beds, bringing the hospital’s total bed count to 624, up from 356. The project also included an expanded emergency department and intensive care unit spaces.

According to SRS, the $49.7 million sale is the largest this year for a medical or office property in Lee County.

SRS, which has offices in Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, is headquartered in Dallas and Hong Kong. The company had $3.1 billion in sales in 2021, with 899 transactions in 49 states. So far in 2022, it has sold 465 properties and has more than $2 billion in property on the market.