A medical office building steps from Huntington Hospital's emergency entrance has traded hands for $13.4 million, and the deal comes with a decade-long lease commitment from a Cedars-Sinai affiliate that will fill the entire second floor. Meridian, a Walnut Creek-based healthcare real estate developer, closed on the 32,052-square-foot property at 55 East California Boulevard this week after nearly a year of untangling a zoning problem that had quietly limited what the building could be used for.
The sale price works out to roughly $417 per square foot, according to The Registry, which reported that CBRE brokers Mark Shaffer and Cody Chiarella represented Meridian in the transaction. The identity of the seller was not disclosed. Meridian entered escrow on the property in September 2025, according to The Real Deal, and spent the months since working through the zoning issue before finalizing the purchase.
Alongside the sale, Huntington Physicians — an affiliate of Huntington Health and the Cedars-Sinai Health System — signed a new 10-year lease covering the property's entire 10,619-square-foot second floor. CBRE's Angie Weber represented Meridian in the lease negotiation, while CBRE brokers Jackie Benavidez and Damon Feldmeth represented the tenant, per reporting from REBusinessOnline.
A Zoning Fix Years in the Making
For years, the building operated under a legal nonconforming zoning classification that complicated its prospects as a medical facility, a technicality that outlet reports trace back through the property's regulatory history. Meridian worked with the city of Pasadena to amend the zoning, and the city approved a zoning text amendment in June, clearing the hurdle and making medical office use a conforming use at the site going forward.
Meridian principal John Pollock said the amendment fundamentally improved the property's long-term viability, and he touted strong healthcare demographics in the surrounding area, according to the same account from The Real Deal. The building sits on 0.8 acres in Pasadena's Raymond Hill neighborhood, was built in 1982, and includes 39 surface parking spaces along with an on-site pharmacy, per Crexi listing details. It sits roughly 0.2 miles — about a five-minute walk — from Huntington Hospital's emergency and trauma center, according to CBRE property records, placing it directly along Pasadena's primary medical corridor near facilities including Pasadena Medical Plaza and Huntington Pavilion.
Renovation Plans and a Tight Local Market
Meridian plans to invest capital into the Class B building, with renovations expected to include a renovated lobby, facade upgrades, new signage, building-systems modernization, and accessibility improvements, aiming to move the property upmarket. The building had reportedly been operating at roughly 50% occupancy before the acquisition, according to Crexi's listing data, leaving significant room for Meridian's repositioning plan to fill vacant space now that the zoning is resolved.
Huntington Hospital, a 544-bed facility that operates the only Level II Trauma Center and Level III NICU in the San Gabriel Valley, formally integrated into the Cedars-Sinai Health System in an earlier Hoodline report on the hospital's operations. Pasadena's broader outpatient medical office market remains tight: the submarket's roughly 771,681 square feet of specialized medical office inventory across 13 buildings carried a direct vacancy rate of just 5.8% as of this year, according to Crexi's market data, even as overall Southern California commercial office vacancy hovers near 20% amid ongoing remote-work shifts.
Part of a Regional Healthcare Real Estate Boom
The Pasadena deal lands amid a broader surge in healthcare leasing and sales activity across Greater Los Angeles. The region leased 331,000 square feet of healthcare space in the second quarter of 2026 and ranked first nationwide for healthcare sales activity during that same period, according to data cited by The Real Deal and attributed to Avison Young, with $285 million in healthcare transaction volume recorded in the quarter. Over the past 12 months, Greater Los Angeles has leased 1.5 million square feet of healthcare space and ranked as the second most active market nationwide for healthcare leasing.
Other recent deals underscore the trend: Douglas Emmett purchased a six-building outpatient property in Beverly Hills' Golden Triangle for $260 million in April, an acquisition that included a 246,000-square-foot outpatient property and gave the firm control of roughly one-third of the Westside city's medical office inventory. In the third quarter of 2025, healthcare was the single largest demand driver in Los Angeles office leasing overall, with more than 415,000 square feet leased, highlighted by Kaiser Permanente's 280,147-square-foot lease renewal in Pasadena, according to Cushman & Wakefield market data.
Nationally, medical office building transaction volume reached $13.3 billion across 1,033 traded properties in 2025, with single-property capitalization rates averaging around 7.2%, per data from The Tenant Advisor. Meridian, founded in 1999 and an affiliate of Marcus & Millichap Company, specializes in acquiring, entitling, and repositioning healthcare and life sciences properties across the Western United States — a strategy the Pasadena deal reflects directly, with the firm leveraging the building's proximity to a major hospital campus as the core of its investment thesis.
