C-PACE stands alone on $172.5M Shoma Bay tower

Newmark has arranged $172.5 million in C-PACE construction financing for Shoma Group's Shoma Bay, a 24-story tower at 1850 John F. Kennedy Causeway in North Bay Village, Florida, with 333 condominium residences and a retail promenade anchored by a 36,000-square-foot Publix Super Market, Connect CRE reports.

Newmark's Anthony Orso, Clifford Welden, Daniel Matz and Henry Stimler placed the financing for Shoma Group, with Nuveen Green Capital providing the debt and Christopher Lawton, Ryan Doyle, Brendan Moore and Tyler Amano leading the lender side; residences run from studios to three-bedroom condominiums and penthouses, with more than 60,000 square feet of amenities.

PWD reported yesterday that the C-PACE assessment stands alone in Shoma Bay's stack, with no bank debt beneath it, and that is the consequential part: the C-PACE instrument carries the entire construction assignment rather than riding alongside a bank loan.

Shoma Bay's stack goes a step beyond the C-PACE use at Boston's Winthrop Center, where $281 million of C-PACE sat on the condo side of an $856 million financing while $575 million of securitized debt carried the offices. Winthrop put the assessment into a shared structure. Shoma Bay hands the entire construction assignment to the assessment alone.

For condo developers, the deal is a pricing template in miniature: a 333-unit vertical build with no bank construction loan in the stack. The open question is how the assessment performs if the job runs late or sales slow. Shoma Bay will not answer that at closing; it will answer it at delivery.