Transwestern Expands Arizona Healthcare Team

Transwestern Commercial Services is expanding its healthcare team in Phoenix. Alongside tremendous local growth in the Arizona healthcare market, Transwestern has hired Kate Morris and Vince Femiano, who will serve as SVP in the firm’s Healthcare Advisory Services group in Phoenix. Morris and Femiano are recognized market leaders, and have been named NAIOP’s Healthcare Brokers of Year award for the last five years. The duo will focus on expanding their team and services in Phoenix.

“Transwestern is concentrating on healthcare. They have always had a pretty strong knowledge in this area and a lot of clients,” Morris tells GlobeSt.com, while Femiano adds, “It is putting a lot of resources into healthcare leadership nationally, adding more disciplines and brokers. There are more than 50 brokers that specialize in healthcare now.”

While the run-up in healthcare has been driven by population growth and demand for outpatient facilities close to population centers, the industry caught investor attention during the last downturn. “Healthcare hasn’t been a specialty for brokerage until the last 10 years,” says Morris. “Now, we see a lot of people specializing in it because the market has become more robust. The real estate world turned their eyes to it because they saw that in a recession, it is pretty bulletproof. The groups that move into spaces tend to stay there for 20 years so that they can keep customers and because hospital infrastructure is expensive to move. Those details make the asset class really attractive to an investor.”

Arizona was primed to take advantage of that growth, and hospital systems supported the new demand by shifting growth strategies following the financial crisis. “We have five hospital systems in Arizona, and ten years ago, their strategy was to invest into primary care physicians that would feed specialist doctors in secondary markets,” says Femiano. “Now, hospital systems have become a lot more bullish on tertiary markets and are building micro hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and are redeveloping old retail into medical office buildings.”

It isn’t only outpatient facilities and urgent care that are growing. While other cities are actually seeing shrinking hospital networks, Arizona’s are growing. “We are also one of the few cities that are building new hospitals,” says Morris. “Most cities are downsizing their hospitals, but we have at least three new hospitals, not including the micro hospitals, going into the valley.”