Avison Young arranges $22.5 million BMO loan on Stamford office campus

Bank of Montreal has written a $22.5 million permanent mortgage on Harbor Square, the 165,114-square-foot multi-building office campus at 700 and 850 Canal St. in Stamford, Conn., with Avison Young's Tri-State debt and equity finance team arranging the loan for an investor group led by Mountain Development Corp. Principals Scott Singer and Andy Singer ran the brokerage's side with executive director Kevin Swartz and senior director Jeff Moroch, working alongside MDC president Michael Seeve; Rich Bianchi and Rick Grassey led BMO's team.

That works out to about $136 a square foot, and the disclosed detail nearly ends there: no term, no rate, no leverage figure, no occupancy for the campus. That leaves the loan amount as the most portable fact and one closing as the limit of what it can prove.

That a bank would put permanent money on Stamford office is worth marking in a cycle where takeout financing for anything outside a small set of trophy assets is the piece of the capital stack owners have struggled to source. It fits the office storyline of trophy comps setting headlines while the rest of the market clears tenant by tenant, leaving Harbor Square as modest evidence that the tenant-by-tenant resolution has a lending channel as well as a sales channel — a permanent bank loan rather than a structured extension or a rescue check.

Takeout capital has been moving through more than one channel this fall: in September, Wells Fargo closed a $115 million Fannie Mae refinancing that moved an unseasoned Long Island City lease-up off its construction lender's books, while Stamford's permanent mortgage came from a bank instead.

Avison Young, the brokerage arranging the loan, has spent the past two years on its own credit: it cut debt and preferred equity by nearly 70 percent and brought its lenders into common equity in a second recapitalization, its second in two years, as PRED reported in August.

Singer's own summary is that BMO "recognized the quality of both the asset and Mountain Development's exceptional track record," and that is a broker's sentence — the second half is the half a credit committee prices. At $136 a square foot, the loan says at least as much about the sponsor's file as it does about Stamford rents. The rate and term BMO settled on, the two numbers that would tell the market how it read the risk, are the ones the closing does not give.