Front Range Partners closes $75M Freddie Mac refi on St. Pete high-rise

Front Range Partners has closed a $75 million fixed-rate refinancing on EVO St. Petersburg, the 23-story apartment tower it delivered downtown in 2023; Freddie Mac provided the debt, and Walker & Dunlop's Capital Markets Institutional Advisory group arranged it for FrontRange Capital Partners, with a nine-person team credited that includes Jonathan Schwartz, Aaron Appel, Dustin Stolly and Adam Schwartz.

The collateral is the kind the agencies have been happy to term out: 220 studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom residences at 334 2nd Ave S, about 13,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and more than 26,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenity space with a pool and wellness rooms, two blocks from the Tampa Bay waterfront and within walking distance of the St. Pete Pier, the Dalí Museum and Beach Drive. Dividing the loan by the unit count works out to roughly $341,000 a unit, a basis that suggests Freddie Mac sized the loan to the rent roll the building produces now rather than to what it cost to build.

That the refinancing clears through the agency at all is the more useful data point. Freddie Mac has appeared in 19 stories across PWD's coverage this year, and it keeps turning up as the permanent-money answer for apartments: October 1 MBA data put Fannie and Freddie delinquency under 1%, against 1.20% on the bank book and 6.53% for CMBS, the latter improved by 42 basis points in the latest reading. Construction-era risk is not the obstacle either—in August an $8.018 million Freddie Mac forward loan locked in the takeout before construction began at a former Kmart site in Battle Creek, Michigan—so a seasoned 2023 delivery in St. Petersburg is the easier end of that book.

Set against the alternative, the transaction looks less like a rescue than a roll. Trepp's second-quarter review found six of ten community banks running off their multifamily loans, leaving the agencies and private lenders to absorb maturities those banks would once have extended themselves. A $75 million fixed-rate takeout from a single agency lender, arranged by a single mortgage bank, carries none of the hallmarks of rescue capital.

The missing detail is what the loan retires and whether any cash came back to Front Range Partners—the detail that distinguished the $180 million Corebridge takeout covered in September, where a 98-percent-leased 2024 delivery closed with cash returned to the sponsors. The next 2023-vintage apartment tower to reach the agencies will show whether this one is a template or an outlier.