Business
HealthSouth sells headquarters
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted June 18, 2007
The once high-flying HealthSouth has sold a symbol of what it once was.
The firm said June 1 it had reached an agreement to sell its Birmingham, Ala., headquarters to an investment fund sponsored by Dallas-based real estate developer Trammell Crow. The purchase price is $60 million.
Included in the deal was HealthSouth's 200,000-square-foot headquarters, an 85-acre corporate campus and an attached 19-acre property that includes an incomplete, 13-story building that was supposed to be HealthSouth's "digital hospital."
HealthSouth plans to lease the headquarters building for one year while it finds other office space in the Birmingham area.
The real estate sale was part of HealthSouth repositioning as a firm offering postacute care services, with a focus on inpatient rehabilitation.
HealthSouth had provided outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation, as well as operated surgery centers, before an accounting scandal broke in 2003, with various executives -- with founder Richard M. Scrushy not among them -- pleading guilty or being convicted of fraud related to the scandal, which involved inflation of earnings.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/06/18/bibf0618.htm.