Washington REIT Hires Cassidy Turley to Sell Region’s Largest Institutional-Quality Medical Office Portfolio

By Adrian Maties, Associate Editor

The Washington Real Estate Investment Trust (WRIT) recently selected Cassidy Turley to sell its 1.3 million-square-foot medical office portfolio in the Washington, D.C., region. The Cassidy Turley team that will market the portfolio includes Paul Collins, Bill Collins, Jud Ryan, Drew Flood and James Cassidy. J.P. Morgan will be co-agent.

WRIT is a leading owner and operator of diversified properties in the Washington, D.C., region. It recently reported fourth quarter and year-end financial and operating results for 2012 and announced a simplification of its diversified strategy to focus on office, multifamily and retail assets. To accelerate this strategy, the real estate investment trust decided to sell its medical office division.

The division consists of 17 institutional-quality medical office properties. It is the largest portfolio of its kind in the Washington, D.C., metro region and has very low leverage, with only three properties encumbered by mortgages totaling $24 million. The assets are all located in affluent communities or urban centers, near major medical centers such as INOVA Fairfax, Shady Grove Adventist and George Washington Hospital.

“Over the past 15 years, WRIT has assembled an exceptional medical office portfolio that accounts for 20 percent of the institutional-grade medical office assets in the D.C. metro area,” said Paul Collins, vice chairman with Cassidy Turley. “We expect the high quality of this portfolio and current marketplace demand for this product type to generate significant buyer interest.”

WRIT expects to gain embedded value through the potential sale of the portfolio. It should provide a lower cost of capital to continue to improve the quality, age and location of the company’s properties in its core office, multifamily and retail sectors.

Cassidy Turley, which named John Benziger as regional managing principal in the D.C. metro region at the end of January, has worked with WRIT before. In 2011, it sold the company’s 3.1 million-square-foot, 56-building industrial portfolio for $350 million.