Gantry places $12.3M floating-rate bridge on Portland's Workshop St. Johns campus

Gantry has placed a $12.3 million floating-rate bridge loan on Workshop St. Johns, the Portland adaptive-reuse campus, refinancing existing debt and funding the next phase of redevelopment and lease-up. Connect CRE reported a regional bank as the lender, with Charlie Kokernak, a director in Gantry's Portland production office, and associate Hrishi Bukshin representing the borrower, Workshop Cathedral Owner, LLC, a joint venture between Baum Revision and Owen Gabbert.

The collateral at 6635 N Baltimore Avenue in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood covers five acres and more than 200,000 square feet across 10 interconnected buildings raised between 1911 and 1970 under a common roof span and fronting the Willamette River. Columbia Sportswear once occupied the property; its tenants now are independent makers, artists, workshops, wellness operators and creative concepts, a rent roll that arrives one lease at a time.

That rent roll points to where such an asset can clear: agency and life-company executions run on stabilized rent rolls a credit committee can model off a spreadsheet, while a creative campus midway through redevelopment offers a scattered roster of local tenants and a sponsor still spending on the build-out. A bank bridge fits that gap, written against the operations already in place while the next phase of leasing comes online, and Kokernak described it in those terms, saying the financing “was structured around the property's existing operations and ownership's next phase of redevelopment and leasing,” with capital to keep investing in the campus.

Gantry's own September shows the split: $48.3 million of Freddie Mac paper on a 248-unit stabilized Maple Grove apartment asset and a three-year insurer loan of $9 million on a fully leased Temecula medical office that retired conduit debt. Across seven Gantry stories in PWD's log, the takeout-style executions go to income a lender can underwrite in place, while the bridge goes to a campus still filling up.

The maturity wall is being rolled rather than repriced, and this loan carries that shape: existing debt retired into new debt, fresh capital attached for the build-out, and the lender sizing the advance off the campus's current operations. The variation is the collateral—not an apartment block or an office with a single credit behind it, but a hundred small leases in a Portland submarket.

The rate risk stays with the borrower: a floating bridge buys time and charges for it, and lease-up across 10 interconnected buildings has to outrun whatever the index does. Spread, index, term, extension options and any lease-up covenant are not in the coverage, so the trade cannot be priced from here. What is on the record is narrower and still worth something: a regional bank wrote $12.3 million against a campus whose oldest building went up in 1911, and sized the loan off the operations already there.