An $85 million SoHo refi that underwrites Microsoft, not SoHo

Newmark arranged an $85 million refinancing for InterVest Capital Partners at 300 Lafayette Street, the COOKFOX-built mixed-use property in SoHo, with Hudson Bay Capital providing the money, Connect CRE reported. Across the building's 82,000 square feet, the loan lands a little above $1,000 a square foot — a basis a lender reaches only by setting the office market aside and underwriting the tenant. Microsoft holds all 63,000 square feet of the office component, while Neko Health, New Era and Goldwin take the retail below.

The Newmark team on the placement was Jordan Roeschlaub, co-head of global debt and structured finance, alongside vice chairman Nick Scribani, managing director John Caraviello and associate director Ryan Bub. Scribani made the case on new construction, full office occupancy and a corner he called one of the heaviest-trafficked intersections in SoHo, describing lender interest as deep and competitive and crediting Zach Cion and the Hudson Bay team with speed and certainty of execution. Those are broker's claims; the loan amount is the only piece the market can actually price.

Mixed-use is doing less work here than the label suggests. Nearly four-fifths of the square footage is a single tenant on a lease in a building finished this cycle, so the retail is a kicker rather than a second business and the financing is a corporate credit trade with a real estate address. Office debt has found a clearance mechanism only where a trade prints, as this publication has argued, and the mechanism at 300 Lafayette runs on tenancy. The Torrance refi this month turned the same machinery on lease-up, with a 93 percent-leased South Bay tower drawing a larger loan while Los Angeles vacancy held at 25.3 percent. Absent an actual sale, a refinancing is the only mark a building like this gets. The market's markers this year have been debt bases rather than prices.

Hudson Bay's name on the loan sheet is the more interesting detail. PWD's records show it as the firm's second tracked real estate financing since mid-August, after one announced at $75 million — a thin sample, and one that reads as a lender picking specific credits rather than running an asset-class program. That posture is defensible on a single-tenant office building in a supply-constrained submarket; it is not obviously defensible anywhere else in office right now.

What decides whether this is a long hold or simply the next refinancing is lease rollover, and the reporting does not give the Microsoft term, the loan's maturity or its pricing. Strip the anchor tenant and the same 82,000 square feet finances at a discount nobody can quote, because no one has printed that comp.