A 35-year owner terms out and keeps its options

Rich Properties has owned Tennis Towers Apartments, the 306-unit West Palm Beach community, for more than 35 years, which is why its $38.55 million Freddie Mac-backed refinancing, originated by Berkadia, carries the terms it does: seven years fixed, four of them interest-only, arranged by Mitch Sinberg, Scott Wadler, Matthew Robbins, Brad Williamson, and Jared Hill. Spread across the unit count, the debt works out to roughly $126,000 a unit.

Tennis Towers is a 1990 build at 2882 Tennis Club Drive, near Okeechobee Boulevard and I-95, with studios through three-bedrooms running roughly 600 to 1,750 square feet, three tennis courts, a pool and sundeck, a heated spa, a 24-hour fitness center, and a car wash area; downtown West Palm Beach, CityPlace, Clematis Street, and the Brightline station are all reachable from the address, with the airport about eleven minutes away. A sponsor that has carried the same rental asset through two full cycles is refinancing on its own schedule rather than a lender's, and the terms are built accordingly.

That liquidity has a clear source: Multifamily originations rebounded 32% as rate calm returned, with Fannie and Freddie behind 40% of 2025's $381.8 billion book spread across 2,530 lenders. Berkadia has been working the agency window at its own pace, closing a $12.4 million LIHTC loan for a Wallick Development project in South Haven, Michigan, earlier this month, its first entry into that sponsor's pipeline.

Tennis Towers reads as the opposite of the other Florida apartment refinancing on our pages this month. The Harlow, a 98%-leased Tampa-area community, took a three-year floating-rate loan in a deal we described as a timed exit bridge, pushing Mast Capital and Rockpoint toward a sale or permanent financing; Rich Properties instead bought seven years of fixed rate and four years without principal. As this publication has argued, the refinancing wall is being rolled rather than repriced, and this loan is that position in its least alarming form, because the asset was never levered against a maturity it could not meet. Rather than anything getting repriced, the price discovery simply moves to a seven-year term that puts it around 2033.

The structure fits this asset, and it would be a poor template for most of the 2022-and-later vintage. A sponsor holding three decades of basis can carry a 2033 maturity; a borrower who bought near the top on short paper cannot, which is why the wall keeps producing extensions instead of deeds. The next hard date on Tennis Towers is not the maturity anyway. It is 2030, when four years of interest-only run out and three years of amortization land ahead of the balloon, against 306 units of West Palm Beach rent that have to cover them.