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Medical outpatient buildings fetch a higher average price per square foot while vacancy rates are lower.
Then you look at medical outpatient buildings, and the picture flips. According to CBRE’s Q3 2025 U.S. Medical Outpatient Building (MOB) report, investors deployed about $2.7 billion into MOBs in a single quarter, up 27% from Q2 and roughly 9% year over year, pushing the trailing four-quarter total to $9.4 billion. Average sale prices reached $298 per square foot, a 51% premium to traditional offices, and average asking rents held at a record $25.20 per square foot even as vacancy remained under 10% nationally.
CBRE notes that average asking rents were at a “record-high $25.20 per sq. ft. in Q3,” and still rising modestly year over year.
In other words, while generic offices are struggling to find a future use, outpatient medical assets are trading at a premium and pulling in fresh capital.
At the same time, the biopharmaceutical industry is quietly rewriting where and how clinical trials happen. McKinsey estimates that roughly 70% of potential trial participants live more than two hours from a major study site, a geography problem that feeds the long-standing pattern in which around three quarters of trials miss enrollment targets or timelines.
To solve that, sponsors are expanding decentralized and hybrid trial models. Mordor Intelligence puts the decentralized clinical trials (DCT) market at about $9.4 billion in 2025 and forecasts it will reach about $18.6 billion by 2030, implying annual growth of roughly 15%.
The built environment for everyday care is being upgraded at the same moment pharma needs a distributed, data-capable network of trial sites. Outpatient clinics are starting to function as critical infrastructure for R&D.
Capital is betting on outpatient care
The CBRE data shows a clear divergence between medical outpatient buildings and conventional office space.
In Q3 2025, MOB sale prices averaged $298 per square foot versus $197 for traditional offices. MOB cap rates averaged 7.0% compared with 7.8% for office, and the sector posted positive net absorption of about 624,000 square feet with roughly 2.4 million square feet still under construction across 59 tracked markets.
The map on page 5 of the CBRE report underlines how broad this is. The Southeast and Midwest together accounted for more than $1.4 billion of Q3 investment, with particularly strong activity in markets like Dallas, Phoenix and Washington, D.C.
That capital is also following a reshoring wave. JLL’s U.S. life sciences outlook finds that about 15 major pharmaceutical companies have announced more than $270 billion in U.S. biomanufacturing and R&D investments over the next five to ten years, largely in response to tariff exposure and supply chain risk.
From doctor’s office to research node
Historically, medical office buildings mainly housed primary care and specialist practices that referred patients into large academic medical centers for trial participation. Today, more of the trial activity is happening in the outpatient buildings themselves.
Private site networks such as Headlands Research and CenExel lease suites in modern MOBs and fit them out to run phase II and III studies at scale.
Recent deals show how private equity values these platforms: THL Partners agreed to acquire Headlands Research from KKR in a deal valued at roughly $600 million, with the transaction set to fuel continued expansion and enhance technology and centralized infrastructure, as Reuters reported. Meanwhile, BayPine agreed to acquire CenExel Clinical Research, with planned investments in digital infrastructure and AI-enabled tools to standardize operations, boost patient recruitment, and improve site performance across its network, according to BayPine.
In addition to exam rooms, those tenants need buildings with robust power, HVAC, secure drug storage, sample processing rooms and fiber connectivity for high-volume data transfer. That favors newer, off-campus MOBs with higher specifications, which helps explain why the sector can command a pricing premium even in a high-rate environment.
Recruitment and diversity
If you look at where MOB demand is strongest, there is a overlap with markets that CROs and sponsors highlight as growth targets for community-based trials. CBRE’s absorption chart places New York City, Detroit, Atlanta and several Sun Belt metros among the top 20 markets for net new space leased in Q3.
If about 70% of prospective participants live beyond a comfortable drive to a big research hospital, then bringing trial visits into suburban oncology centers, cardiology clinics and primary care MOBs removes one of the most basic barriers: travel time and cost.
Outpatient sites feel more familiar and less intimidating than a university hospital campus—especially for communities that have been underrepresented in clinical trials and overrepresented in historical research abuses, such as the Tuskegee study. With roughly 80% of trials still delayed by enrollment shortfalls and minority participation stuck below 10% in many studies, community-based locations have become essential for closing the diversity gap.
Take-home points for R&D
None of this proves that MOB capital flows cause the shift in clinical trial models. The chain of causality also runs in the other direction: pharma’s need to reach patients and generate better data creates demand for research-capable outpatient facilities, which in turn makes the asset class more attractive to investors.
Three grounded take-home points emerge from the data: CBRE’s numbers show that medical outpatient buildings are one of the few office-like asset classes still posting rising rents, positive absorption and growing investment at a time when central business district vacancy is near 19%. McKinsey’s estimate that about 70% of potential trial participants live more than two hours from traditional sites, combined with the rapid growth of the DCT market, explains why those same MOB markets are becoming attractive nodes for decentralized and community-based trials. Private equity and REIT activity around research site networks and outpatient portfolios suggests that the physical and digital standards of MOBs are being upgraded with data collection in mind, turning the buildings themselves into part of the clinical evidence engine.
The charts in CBRE’s MOB report look like real estate fundamentals at first glance. Viewed through an R&D lens, they hint at something larger: the clinic and the lab are being braided together along suburban medical corridors, one outpatient building at a time.
Filed Under: clinical trials
