Tampa REIT sells Texas health care center for $258 million

Naples/Fort Myers

Sleep with the fishes: A 20-acre site in Port Charlotte has sold and will be protected from development. The acreage is in the Charlotte Harbor Preserve State Park and sold for $29,330.70. While in the world of high stakes real estate that may seem like a pittance, preserving the space will protect tarpon, snook and redfish allowing them to breed and grow unbothered says the buyer, the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast. It bought the “in-hold” parcel in a deed tax auction. The Osprey-based organization say “inholding” is a term for privately-owned property within a national forest, state park or other protected areas. The estuary, according to a statement, is at the mouth of Tippecanoe Bay on Sam Knight Creek, a tributary to Charlotte Harbor.

Full bank job: The St. Petersburg developer behind the 321-unit Montage at Midtown complex in Fort Myers has secured a $75 million construction loan. The financing was provided by New York-based Dwight Capital, according to a post on its website and a blog post by the developer, Catalyst Community Development. The $100 million project is currently under construction in the Midtown Fort Myers district. Phase 1 of the project is expected to be complete in 2025 and will include the units as well as a 17,000-square-foot amenities center. Phase 2, which Catalyst doesn’t give a start day for, will include retail, office and residential space. Catalyst is a B Corporation and has developed 1,573 units, including in Fort Myers and Cape Coral, since 2013 totaling $260 million. It has $210 million in development projects in the pipeline. A B Corp means a developer is socially conscious in how it approaches project.

Tampa/St. Petersburg

Texas sized sale: Sila Realty Trust has sold a Texas health care facility for $258.4 million. The 373,000-square-foot building is in Webster, Texas, and operates as the UTMB Health Clear Lake Hospital. Webster is a suburb southeast of Houston. The buyer was the Board of Regents of the University of Texas, which had been leasing the 199-bed hospital since 2018. The university regents, Sila says in a note to investors released Friday Dec. 15, had a purchase option in the lease that was exercised. Sila says in the note that a portion of the proceeds went to “pay down all of its outstanding variable rate debt, leaving the company with 100% of its debt fixed through interest rate swaps, with the balance of proceeds to be used for general corporate purposes.” Sila, which has offices in Water Street, owns more than 130 properties and two undeveloped parcels in 59 U.S. markets. This after selling 29 data center properties in 2021 to a Singapore-based company for $1.32 billion. According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Sila first became involved in the property around 2013 when it was named Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT. In the SEC filing from that year, the company says it provided a $20 million bridge loan to build what was then called the Bay Area Regional Medical Center in Webster. According to published reports, that facility closed in 2018 shortly before the University of Texas signed its lease and opened the next year.

Courtesy image

End care: Construction has begun on an $11 million hospice center in Pasco County. The facility, being built at 5299 Deer Park Drive, New Port Richey, will be single story and have 24 private beds with clerestory windows for natural lighting and a waterfall in the lobby. The facility will be called Gulfside Hospice. The builder is Sarasota-based Halfacre Construction. Halfacre, which announced the project, says work began in early December and is expected to take about a year to complete. The developer is Gulfside Healthcare Services, a 30-year-old nonprofit which operates Gulfside Hospice, Gulfside Palliative Care and Gulfside Home Health.

Sarasota/Manatee

Photo by Carter Weinhofer

Partner then sell: The Tidewell Foundation and its parent company Empath Health have put the nonprofit’s Longboat Key office on the market. According to the Longboat Observer, a sister paper of the Business Observer, the property at 540 Bay Isles Road is listed by Ian Black Real Estate for $3.1 million. Empath Health recently merged with and Stratum Health System, which had previously been the parent company of Tidewell. The building had been home to the Paradise Center, Fitness Quest Longboat Key, Youthful Aging Home Health, JFCS of the Suncoast and the foundation. SCATA Real Estate, Stratum Health’s real estate division, bought the 8,000-square-foot building in 2019, paying $1.75 million at the time.

Banking on the drugstore: A Miami based bank has lent $6.4 million for the construction of a Walgreens in Lakewood Ranch. Ocean Bank has lent the money to an LLC run by George Morgan who heads The Morgan Group. The LLC’s Fort Lauderdale address matches the property management company’s address in state records. The Walgreens, according to a statement from Ocean Bank, will be 15,000 square feet and at the intersection of University Parkway and Lucent Place. Morgan is also building an Ocean Bank-financed Walgreens store in Orlando. Ocean Bank was chartered in 1982 and has $6.1 billion in assets.

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