Our Health Care Real Estate Briefing is your comprehensive summary of weekly health care real estate highlights currently happening across the nation.
- The CDC is reviewing its mask guidance and will decide whether to relax the guidance based on the number of Covid hospitalizations. In the past, the CDC looked at the number of new Covid cases. Covid hospitalizations are down 61% since January, and the number of new Covid cases dropped 83% since January per CNBC and Johns Hopkins.
- A California legislator proposed a bill that, if passed, would require California skilled nursing facilities (“SNFs”) to spend a minimum of 85% of their revenue on direct resident care. The author of the bill claims that SNFs with the highest profit margins often have more compliance and quality issues.
- The cost of long-term care services is on the rise, primarily because of labor costs. Additionally, the cost of home health services are up 12.5%, homemaker services 10.6%, assisted living services 4.6% and SNF services 1.9% to 2.4% according to Genworth’s Cost of Care Survey.
- A new study compared unreimbursed Medicaid costs of non-profit and for-profit hospitals. In 2019, for-profit and non-profit hospitals had similar unreimbursed Medicaid costs (around 2.5%) and in 2018 for-profit hospitals provided more charity care (3.8%) compared to non-profit hospitals (2.3%) per Stat News and Modern Healthcare.
- The L.A. County Supervisors approved $1.6B to upgrade Harbor UCLA Medical Center, which will include a new 468K sf hospital with 346 beds per Becker’s.
- St. David’s HealthCare plans to spend nearly $1B on several new facilities in the Austin, TX metro area. This includes a new hospital in Kyle and another in Leander, a new behavioral hospital and an expansion of its Women’s Center per Austin Business Journal.
- The former Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento will be redeveloped into a mixed-use project anchored by a 46-acre teaching hospital and medical campus for California Northstate University per Sacramento Business Journal.
- Northwestern Memorial Healthcare purchased the 17-story Hyatt Centric Chicago Magnificent Mile hotel for an undisclosed price. The hotel will be available for hospital patients and events per The Real Deal.
- CareTrust REIT announced plans to de-risk its portfolio by selling or repurposing 32 SNFs and senior housing facilities. Several facilities will be converted into behavioral health facilities per Skilled Nursing News.
- The Ensign Group (a large SNF operator) officially established a captive REIT called Standard Bearer Healthcare REIT in order to keep its real estate function in-house per McKnights.
