Dwight’s $62M Culver City refi buys time, not a sale

Dwight Investment Management has closed a $62 million bridge loan on the Lana apartments, a newly developed 139-unit Culver City building whose financing pays down prior debt and preferred equity before the project has finished lease-up. Commercial Observer first reported the deal, which also funds an interest reserve and was originated by Katie Goldenberg, with First Draw Capital's Antonio Hachem and Kyle Redmond negotiating the debt for owner GR Properties USA, run by Bill Wei. The seven-story building at 10375 Washington Boulevard, 11 miles west of downtown Los Angeles, holds 13 studios, 95 one-bedrooms and 31 two-bedrooms, plus 2,000 square feet of retail and amenities from a pool and fitness center to EV charging stations.

At $62 million across 139 units, the debt works out to about $446,000 a door, a number that describes the size of the loan rather than the value of the collateral. The structure tells the fuller story: Dwight is paying off the developer’s prior debt and preferred equity while reserving interest, which suggests the building’s income is still ramping, and Hachem described underwriting focused on the strength of the project, worked through a complicated stack. That is a lender choosing cash flow over waiting for a cap-rate reset.

The Lana deal is the refinancing wall bending rather than breaking: lenders and sponsors, as this publication has argued, are buying the wall another year rather than marking the loans down. The sponsor here is not asking Dwight for forbearance; Dwight is refinancing the layers that stood between the first mortgage and the sponsor. It follows PRED’s August report on Dwight’s $70 million nonrecourse, interest-only loan for Cosmo 440, the once-vacant Newark tower, where private credit was willing to price a stabilized asset on current income; now it is pricing a suburban Los Angeles property before full lease-up.

Dwight could have waited until Lana was fully stabilized and refinanced at lower risk, but moving before stabilization means accepting leasing risk to clear a preferred-equity layer that would likely become more expensive or more difficult to service the longer it stays in place—a bet that a new building’s operating story is stronger than the capital structure built for its construction. If that bet wins, Dwight gets a performing bridge loan and a relationship on a stabilized asset; if it is wrong, the interest reserve and the amenity package are the cushion. The clearing price for this building is being set by the lender’s cash-flow model, not by a sale.