OAK LAWN, IL-Even though healthcare real estate is often considered fundamentally different from other real estate sectors, one fundamental remains important when planning a new facility: location.
For that reason, a Chicago-based healthcare development firm, Bluestone Healthcare Partners LLC, kept its eye on an in-demand medical services corridor in Oak Lawn hoping it would someday find land on which to build a new medical office building. Finding such a site required patience, however, as the corridor, near the 694-bed Advocate Christ Medical Center on 95th Street, is part of a densely developed area in which available sites rarely become available.
“It was very difficult for us to locate a sizeable parcel on West 95th Street and in close proximity to the hospital,” says Mike MacKinnon, director of development for Bluestone. “This market has a well-insured population with over 500,000 people within five miles of any point along the corridor.”
He says that having three hospitals within a short distance – Little Company of Mary, Palos Community Hospital and Advocate Christ Medical Center – “make this medical corridor highly competitive.”
So when one of the company's brokers, Mike Siedlecki of Oak Brook-based Polivka Group, learned that State Farm was soliciting bids to dispose of a former claims building it had vacated adjacent to Advocate Christ Medical Center, Bluestone jumped at the chance in 2011 to acquire the building and its 2.53-acre site at 4220 W. 95th St.
Bluestone has razed the State Farm building and in recent weeks began construction on an $18 million, 37,658-square-foot outpatient building with clinic space. The development firm, which is financing and will own the MOB, has chosen Anderson Mikos Architects Ltd. to design the facility, and Bulley & Andrews as the general contractor; both firms are based in Chicago.
As Bluestone officials gear up for an opening later this year, possibly in November, the building is already 80% preleased to Advocate Health and Hospitals Corp. and Orland Park, IL-based-based Midwest Orthopaedic Consultants.
Brad Wilson, principal and co-founder of Bluestone Healthcare Partners, calls the site of the future building the “gateway of the 95th Street medical corridor,” adding that more than 43,000 vehicles pass by the site daily.
Because of the future MOB's location, MacKinnon notes, Bluestone is “in talks with three physician practices that will individually or collectively lease the remaining 7,000 square feet in the building.”
For Bluestone, the project comes at a time when it also has medical projects under way or in the pipeline in Willowbrook, IL and Pewaukee WI, where MacKinnon says it has received “significant interest from two Milwaukee-based medical systems” for space in a future 40,000-square-foot MOB.
The company also has additional sites in the Chicago suburbs that are currently under contract.
John B. Mugford is the Editor of Healthcare Real Estate Insights™, the nation's first and only publication totally dedicated to covering news and trends in healthcare real estate development, financing and investment. For more information, please visit www.HREInsights.com.
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