Draper & Kramer places $93.5M refinance on the Elizabeth

The $93.5 million refinance Draper and Kramer's commercial finance group has closed on The Elizabeth resets a coupon on a 2024-vintage Fulton Market tower, but the construction-lending comment inside the announcement is the part that matters more. Bill Barry and Bill Stewart, both senior vice presidents in the group, arranged the loan, which covers the 350 rental apartments and the 10,000 square feet of street-level retail at 225 N. Elizabeth St., the 28-story building Sterling Bay and Ascentris completed in 2024, according to Connect CRE.

Across 350 units the loan works out to roughly $267,000 a unit, a basis a lender accepts when it is underwriting the submarket rather than the rent roll. The Elizabeth is two years old and sits in a pocket where, in Stewart's telling, financing is easing for the right opportunities in prime locations; that qualifier does less work than it sounds because the multifamily lending machine has already restarted in size — 2,530 lenders who split a $381.8 billion book in 2025, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taking 40% of it, as this publication reported in August.

Barry reads the deal as evidence of Chicago multifamily's strength — limited new inventory pushing rents at existing properties, plus non-agency lenders' appetite for high-quality apartment collateral — and both readings can be true at once; what the transaction does not show is deleveraging. Stewart describes clients swapping out their current rate, which makes this a coupon trade with a fresh maturity attached, and the recession-era question of whether the sponsor can carry the asset never gets asked.

The second half of Stewart's quote does the real work, extending that easing to construction financing for new projects in areas where multifamily demand is growing. Refinance liquidity is the easy part of the claim, since every stabilized tower with a decent basis has three balance-sheet lenders circling and the rent-growth trade this publication described in Waterton's Belltown purchase is being repriced by operators rather than by the market. A construction bid is the hard half: this desk has argued the maturing-debt wall is being resolved through repricing and structured extension rather than distress sales, and this transaction is what the benign end of that looks like — an asset, a sponsor with an equity partner, a lender taking scarcity as collateral. The rent case here is voiced by the debt intermediary, not by a buyer clearing a price.

The next lease-up refinance in Fulton Market is the number to watch. If the following tower prints at or inside this per-unit basis with less supply constraint behind it, non-agency appetite has genuinely widened and the coupon math gets easier for everyone. If it does not print, the window stays exactly as narrow as the quote suggests — and construction starts in Chicago's prime submarkets stay a 2027 conversation.