MINNETONKA, MN-In recent years, healthcare real estate (HRE) professionals here in the United States have been waiting to see if the amount of foreign capital invested in domestic medical office buildings (MOBs) would continue to rise.

For a time, it seemed as if that would indeed be the case. For example, in 2011 cross-border buyers acquired a total of a $365 million worth of medical office buildings (a figure that includes only transactions of $2.5 million or more), according to statistics supplied by real estate research firm Real Capital Analytics Inc. In that year, foreign investment represented about 8.7 percent of the total MOB sales volume nationwide, which according to RCA came in at about $4.2 billion.

Yet despite the seemingly rising interest from cross-border investors, foreign investments fell dramatically in 2012, dropping to $83 million – out of a total MOB sales volume of $3.13 billion.