DOC heads into the final week of May with an unusual alignment: the stock is up 22% in a month, short sellers have pulled back sharply, and analysts across the Street have been quietly marking targets higher.
The most striking development is how fast bearish positioning has reversed. Short interest dropped 18% over the past week to roughly 4.1% of the free float — the largest weekly unwind since April. A month ago, shorts were running closer to 4.9% of float and the position was near its highest level of the year. Now, with the stock recovering to $20.03, that trade has become visibly expensive to hold. Cost to borrow has also faded, down 9% on the week to just 0.36% — effectively free to borrow — which points to shorts exiting voluntarily rather than being squeezed out. Availability is extremely loose at over 1,150% of short interest, meaning there is no shortage of supply for anyone still wanting to build a new position.
Options traders have turned notably bullish. The put/call ratio dropped to 0.31 this week, almost two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.54, with the reading close to the lower end of its 52-week range. That shift — from a ratio consistently above 0.60 through most of April and early May — aligns directly with the short cover. The options market and the lending market are telling the same story: near-term hedging demand has evaporated.
The analyst community has caught up quickly to the price move. Morgan Stanley raised its target to $20 from $18 this week while holding its Overweight rating — a notable signal given the stock is now trading at that level. Scotiabank followed today, lifting its target to $21. RBC, Baird, Citigroup, and UBS all raised targets earlier in the month, a near-consensus acknowledgement that the April selloff overshot fundamentals. The mean price target now sits at $20.72, only a sliver above the current price, which limits the headline upside case but also signals broad acceptance that the re-rating is real. The EV/EBITDA multiple has expanded to roughly 14.9x over the past week — still not stretched for a healthcare REIT — while the price-to-book multiple has risen to just under 2x, up about 0.32x over 30 days. The EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 99th percentile, reflecting the outsized positive reactions to recent results.
Those earnings reactions deserve attention. Healthpeak's most recent prints — in early May — produced one-day moves of roughly 19-20%, with five-day moves extending to 18-21%. The April 30 release generated a more modest 2.7% first-day move but a 23% five-day gain as investors absorbed the results. That pattern of large post-earnings drifts, rather than immediate spikes, suggests the stock responds more to narrative re-evaluation than to the initial headline. The next scheduled release is August 6.
Peer healthcare REITs have moved broadly in line with DOC this week: ARE gained 3.8% and HR added 0.8%, suggesting sector-level buying rather than a DOC-specific rotation. The bear case — focused on lab tenant credit risk, weak Q2 leasing, and compressed FFOPS growth forecasts around +1% for 2026 — has not changed structurally. What has changed is the price from which investors are weighing those risks. With analyst targets clustered tightly around current levels and short interest still deflating, the August earnings print becomes the next meaningful test of whether the recovery reflects genuine fundamental progress or a positioning washout that got ahead of itself.
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