Medical Office Feasibility Study in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA Metro Area

Physicians' offices: larger and more common than the country's

Atlanta's physician-office lending outruns the national pattern in two ways. Locally the class weighs 1.41x its national share, and the $469,000 median loan is 1.37x the class's national median. SBA approved 230 loans between FY2017 and FY2026, worth $180.3 million, which puts the area 7 of 488 for the class even though in the area's own table of classes medical office is just 8 of 39. Loans in the central half begin at $244,000 and end at $1.1 million, a floor high enough to rule out most small practices.

Program mix and geography

SBA 7(a) has 199 loans and SBA 504 has 31, so around one loan in seven used the real estate program. Fulton County holds 72 loans, Gwinnett 37, DeKalb 26, Cobb 24 and Clayton 14, with Forsyth at 9, Coweta and Fayette at 8 each, Cherokee at 7 and Henry at 5. Yearly counts are printed for FY2017 (26 loans, $21.7 million), FY2018, FY2019 and FY2023 through FY2026, with FY2024 and FY2025 both at 31. The figures for FY2020 through FY2022 are withheld at the source for lack of loans in those years, and the gap implies neither a surge nor a slump.

Holders and a development company

Small Business Access Partners, Inc. holds 16 504 loans worth $16.1 million, and Florida Business Development Corporation holds 5. On the 7(a) side United Community Bank (SC) holds 14 loans worth $10.4 million, Newtek Small Business Finance, LLC holds 10 for $22.7 million, Live Oak Banking Company 10 for $11.5 million, Wells Fargo Bank National Association 10 for $4.4 million and The Huntington National Bank 9 for $3.2 million. Per loan, Newtek's dollars outrun every other name there. The column shows who holds a loan now, which may not be who wrote it, so it cannot be used to guess any lender's appetite.

Cancellation floor and the withheld values

Cancellation after approval was at least 11.0% across approvals of FY2017 to FY2024; SBA also leaves out the franchise share, the cancellation ceiling and any charge-off rate for this cell. With so few loans behind each, none is printed, none is nil, and loss evidence for Atlanta medical practices has to come from elsewhere.

Testing an Atlanta medical practice

With tickets that large, a study should treat the project as a practice acquisition or a build-out and say which. It should model patient volume from payer mix and referral patterns, test physician compensation and staffing against collections, and show how the practice would carry its debt if a partner left. Clinical buildout is costly and specialized, so the study should address what an appraiser can credit as value if the practice closes. Atlanta's metro spans many counties with different competition for physicians; the study should size the catchment of the actual site. Only counties placed in a July 2023 area appear in this record.