Davis affiliate provides $44M senior construction loan for Boston office-to-apartment conversion

The first deal in The Davis Companies' integrated credit platform is a $44 million senior construction loan on 31 Milk St., the 1921 Beaux Arts office building in Downtown Boston being converted into 110 apartments, according to Connect CRE. JLL Capital Markets arranged the three-year loan and represented the borrowers, Dinosaur Capital Partners and Mugar Enterprises, with managing director Anthony Cutone among the brokers on the assignment.

Davis is a Boston owner and developer, and the senior loan is only one layer: federal and state historic tax credits and MassHousing subordinate financing sit beside it, which places the junior capital with public and tax-credit sources rather than a mezzanine fund. The coverage attaches no pricing to any layer, so the blended cost of the stack—the figure that decides whether a conversion clears—is not public.

The 11-story building will hold 88 market-rate apartments and 22 affordable ones at completion in 2027. If the three-year term clocks from the announcement, it extends past delivery into 2029, which implies the lender underwrote lease-up alongside construction: rent-up is where conversion risk usually concentrates.

Cutone called the financing a benchmark for Boston adaptive reuse, requiring collaboration and creative structuring, an apt enough description for a stack that pairs federal credits, state credits and an agency subordinated lender. For older office stock, that combination is the way out of the trophy-versus-commodity repricing split: rather than mark a 1921 building down tenant by tenant, the owner changes what the building is.

Dinosaur Capital Partners arrives with recent form: PWD's records list two September transactions—a $48 million closing and a $45.75 million construction loan—the same figures reported in the Affinius–Axonic and Affinius Lexington loans. Repeat borrowers give underwriters a comparables set, and this one is current.

Davis, too, appeared in September as joint-venture developer of a 462,000-square-foot Gastonia industrial building laid out to flex between a single tenant and several, a firm comfortable structuring optionality. Nothing in the coverage says whether the new credit platform will lend to third-party sponsors or keep its capital inside Davis's own pipeline; the second deal will indicate which, and at what spread.