515 buildings would rather evaluate your use than post an asking rent
Of the 1,631 buildings with medical office space available across Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire in September, 1,038 published a direct asking rent and 78 listed only sublease space. The other 515 quote a rent on request, once they know who you are and what you need.
That gap matters. A practice that only compares buildings posting a number is comparing part of the market, and the landlord of the building it likes knows it. Our rent trends report covers the full survey: one asking range per priced building, its lease structure, and medians for the 95 trade areas with at least three priced buildings, out of the 145 we cover. For buildings that withhold pricing, we ask the landlord.
In Los Angeles, buildings with triple-net (NNN) leases are not 36 cents cheaper than Full Service buildings
The median Full Service ask for medical space in Los Angeles is $3.11/SF/month. NNN is $2.75, and Modified Gross is $2.84.
Full Service includes operating costs and utilities. NNN adds property tax, insurance and common-area costs on top of base rent, and tenants often pay their own utilities and janitorial too, so those costs can close the 36-cent gap or exceed it. Two other structural issues show up depending on market:
- Monthly vs annual. $3.00/SF/month is $36.00/SF/year, and some listings quote annually. Discuss this with your broker to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison.
- Rentable vs usable. Rent is charged on rentable square feet, which includes your share of lobbies, halls and restrooms. Load factors differ from building to building, so the same rate can buy noticeably different usable space.
Put both buildings on the same lease structure and the same unit before comparing them. Los Angeles rents by lease structure.
Orange County's NNN medical buildings ask more than Full Service
In Orange County, NNN medical space asks more than Full Service: a $2.88/SF/month median against $2.50. That is backwards, since NNN puts taxes, insurance and common-area costs on top of the rent.
It is not because the NNN buildings are nicer: 63 of the 67 priced NNN buildings are Class B or C, against 40 of 47 Full Service buildings. For a practice, the typical NNN quote in the county starts higher than the typical Full Service quote before a single expense is added, so the all-in gap between two buildings can be wider than the headline numbers suggest.
Newport Beach leads the county at a $4.25 median, followed by Irvine/Tustin Legacy at $4.00 and Irvine Spectrum at $3.85. Orange County rents by trade area.
Kearny Mesa: hospital-adjacent practice space without hospital-campus rents
Kearny Mesa has 144,490 SF of medical space available across 17 buildings, and 6 of them don't publish a rent. It sits in a great trade area and the middle of San Diego's hospital map: Sharp Memorial and Rady Children's sit on adjacent campuses near Frost Street at the south end of Kearny Mesa, and Kaiser Permanente's San Diego Medical Center is on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.
Buildings on Modified Gross leases run $1.60 to $3.50/SF/month, and the trade area median is $2.75/SF/month against $2.56/SF/month for San Diego overall. All 17 buildings are Class B or C, built between 1973 and 1991, many of them along Convoy, Clairemont Mesa Boulevard and Ruffin, so condition and parking can matter as much as address.
Beverly Hills and Santa Monica: same floor, different ceiling
The cheapest Full Service medical space in Beverly Hills and in Santa Monica asks the same rent: $2.95/SF/month. The difference is at the top. Beverly Hills Full Service asks run to $10.00; Santa Monica's top out at $6.50. Across all lease structures, the medians are $5.25 and $4.00, but much of that gap is lease mix: on Full Service alone, the medians are $5.10 in Beverly Hills and $5.33 in Santa Monica.
Beverly Hills has 466,177 SF of medical space available in 55 buildings, most of them on the Wilshire corridor and the Bedford, Roxbury and Camden blocks, with Cedars-Sinai just east of the city line. Santa Monica has 287,758 SF in 35 buildings, anchored by UCLA Health Santa Monica Medical Center and Providence Saint John's Health Center.
A practice that needs a Beverly Hills address should look at the older buildings on the east end of Wilshire Boulevard and along La Cienega, all in ZIP 90211, where several asks start between $2.95 and $4.50, below the $5.25 median. And 19 of the 55 Beverly Hills buildings don't publish a rent at all.
The Inland Empire discount, compared like with like
The median medical office ask in the Inland Empire is $2.00/SF/month, 32% below Los Angeles at $2.95. Read that number carefully: about half of the priced Inland Empire buildings (75 of 153) quote NNN, so for many of them, taxes, insurance and common-area costs sit on top of the quoted rent. Only 13 quote Full Service. Compare like with like and the gap narrows: the NNN median is $2.05 in the Inland Empire against $2.75 in Los Angeles, about 25% lower.
The spread inside the region is wide too: Chino/Chino Hills leads at $2.80 and Mojave River Valley is lowest at $1.50. For a practice following its patients east, the gap can be meaningful, but it has to be measured all-in, building by building. Inland Empire rents by trade area.
From recent deals
Lighthouse Pediatrics: 4,261 SF in Torrance
We placed Lighthouse Pediatrics in 4,261 SF in Torrance. Just under 3,000 SF of it is the exam side: 8 exam rooms, a nurse station, an intake area, a waiting room, an admin office, 3 restrooms and a file/storage area. Surgery and administrative space take the rest.
That is about 370 rentable SF per exam room, below the low end of the 385 to 600 rentable SF per room our calculator plans for. Even at 385 SF per room, the calculator puts a space that size at 7 exam rooms at most; Lighthouse fits 8. An efficient layout can beat the rule of thumb, which is why we test-fit the floor plan before a practice commits to a suite size.
Torrance is not a discount trade area. Its median medical ask is $3.62/SF/month, 10th highest of 42 Los Angeles trade areas and above the Los Angeles median of $2.95. Practices that want to be near Torrance Memorial pay for the location, so the terms around the rate deserve as much attention as the rate itself.
23500 Hawthorne Blvd: an owner-user purchase $500,000 below asking
Our client bought the medical office building at 23500 Hawthorne Blvd in Torrance for $2.7 million, $500,000 below the asking price. The building had been on the market for over a year, with several failed escrows behind it.
Our client saw a use that was underserved in the community, one that required significant structural and cosmetic changes. That plan came with a real construction bill.
So we negotiated on two fronts. The comps set the value of the building as it stood. The cost of the work it needed for our client's use went into the offer strategy from day one, not as an afterthought. It was a long negotiation, and it closed $500,000 below asking.
A building that has sat for a year is telling you something. The buyer who can price what it needs, and show the seller why, is the one who sets the terms.
Figures are asking rents in dollars per square foot per month from our September 2026 survey of buildings with medical office space available. They are a snapshot of that month; the rent trends report always shows the latest survey.
