Highmark buys monastery campus [The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]

June 28--Maybe health insurer Highmark Inc. found religion.

The Downtown-based company has continued its real estate-buying spree with the purchase last month of the Benedictine Sisters of Pittsburgh's 11-acre monastery campus in Ross.

While Highmark confirmed that a subsidiary, Summer Wind Management Co., purchased the property on May 31 for $2.7 million, spokesman Aaron Billger declined to discuss the company's plans.

The Perrysville Avenue property includes a 75-bedroom monastery, built in 1928, and St. Benedict Hall, which was a school until 1985 when it was converted to a senior center, among other buildings.

Sister Evelyn Dettling said a confidentiality agreement prevented her from discussing the sale. She said the property had been on the market for several years.

The 52 sisters who live at the monastery will remain there until a monastery is built in Richland, Dettling said. The sisters held a ground-breaking for that building on Bakerstown Road on June 18, and they expect construction to be complete by the fall of 2013.

Working through law firm DiPaulo & Russo, which has offices in Uptown and Cranberry, Highmark has formed more than a dozen shell companies over the last year for its property acquisition activities. Billger called the practice a standard business activity to avoid being overcharged by landowners.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. recently employed the same strategy, when it used shell companies to quietly buy up a block of property Downtown for its new 33-story headquarters office tower.

Highmark, the state's largest health insurance company, is in the process of creating a $1 billion medical-service network to compete with UPMC, the dominant health system in Western Pennsylvania. The network will be anchored by West Penn Allegheny Health System, a five-hospital system Highmark is trying to buy for $475 million. It also has partnered with Jefferson Regional Medical Center is a deal worth at least $275 million.

Key to its strategy is acquiring and partnering with physician practices throughout the Pittsburgh region and building outpatient medical centers to attract new patients.

Highmark officials have said they expect to have 10 outpatient centers, or medical malls, ringing Pittsburgh. Medical malls can be one-stop centers for a variety of medical services, such as primary care physician offices, pharmacy, diagnostics and imaging, rehabilitation, ambulatory surgery centers and other outpatient services.

So far Highmark subsidiaries have purchased property in Cranberry, Pine and Monroeville, in addition to the Benedictine campus in Ross.

In Cranberry, Highmark last month bought a 25-acre parcel in the Cranberry Woods office park for $8.9 million. In Pine, using two subsidiaries, it spent more than $14 million earlier this year to assemble 35 acres along Route 19, including a three-story office building on Copperleaf Court. And in Monroeville last month, it spent $2.6 million to buy a commercial property on Monroeville Boulevard.

Alex Nixon is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7928 or anixon@tribweb.com.

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