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Santa Monica medical office building sells in record-setting deal

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A medical office building across the street from the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica has sold for nearly $55 million to a Carpinteria investment firm in what brokers believe was a record-setting transaction.

Montecito Medical Investment Co. bought the three-story building at 1223 16th St. from its developer, Nautilus Group Inc. of San Francisco, in an off-market deal. The price — $1,063 per square foot — was the highest ever paid for a single U.S. medical office building outside New York, according to real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc.

The UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Oncology Center, as the building is known, has eight operating rooms for outpatient surgery, a linear accelerator for radiation oncology, a laboratory and a pharmacy.

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Built in 2011, it also has what brokers say is the West Coast’s first fully automated parking system that automatically parks and retrieves visitors’ cars. The mechanical valet can store 385 cars in half the space of conventional garages.

Visitors pull onto one of six parking platforms and then the robotic system picks up each vehicle and stores it in a compartment based on its size. When visitors leave, the robotic system retrieves their cars while they pay their parking charges.

The building, designed by Michael W. Folonis Architects, also has a rooftop photovoltaic system that provides solar power for about 15% of the building’s energy needs.

Medical office buildings are often sought after by investors because they tend to have tenants who can reliably pay the rent and rarely move out, broker Eric Tompkins of CBRE Group said.

“This is an ideal medical office investment because it is directly across the street from a world-class hospital,” Tompkins said.

In addition to the outpatient and oncology facilities, the building contains clinical offices for several UCLA Department of Medicine practices including the Food and Drug Allergy Care Center, Center for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, pulmonary and sleep medicine and nephrology.

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roger.vincent@latimes.com

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