Gantry places $48.3M Freddie Mac takeout on Maple Grove apartments

The refinancing wall is sorting itself by asset quality, and Freddie Mac has just set the price at the head of the queue: a $48.3 million permanent loan on The Edison at Maple Grove, a 248-unit apartment property northwest of Minneapolis placed by Gantry and reported by Connect CRE. The 10-year, fixed-rate, non-recourse, full-term interest-only loan retires construction financing on the two-building, five-story class A podium-style asset at 9820 Garland Lane North, where one-, two- and three-bedroom units sit above two levels of heated underground parking and 149 surface spaces.

Gantry principals Joe Monteleone and Bonnie Monteleone arranged the credit out of the firm's St. Louis office for a private real estate investor, and Monteleone is explicit about the conditions that made the structure available: “The marketplace for debt on high-quality multifamily is flush with the agencies, life companies, banks and others competing aggressively for their target allocations.” Full-term interest-only is the sharpest evidence of that competition, because the borrower will not amortize a dollar of principal before the loan matures and the full $48.3 million faces refinancing as a single balloon at the end of the 10-year term.

Freddie Mac wrote that loan on a non-recourse basis with a fixed rate, so the agency's exit depends on the property's value at maturity, not on amortization or recourse.

Gantry has been steering clients down that longer-dated path: in late August, the firm arranged a $28.3 million five-year life company refi in California's Central Valley, a non-recourse, interest-only floating-rate loan that replaced bank debt, as this publication reported. The Maple Grove credit is $20 million larger and carries twice the term, so Gantry's recent bookends now run from a five-year floating-rate life company facility to a 10-year fixed-rate agency permanent loan.

Freddie Mac's recent forward commitment in Battle Creek, which locked an $8.018 million permanent loan on workforce housing before construction started, and the Maple Grove takeout both keep agency capital attached to newly built multifamily. One priced the exit before groundbreaking; the other retires construction debt after delivery. Freddie is not waiting for maturities to find it.

For sponsors of stabilized class A product, the divergence is good news: a decade at full-term interest-only, non-recourse fixed rates, while the rest of the market negotiates amortization and shorter terms. The wall is not a single event but a queue sorted by asset quality, and Freddie Mac has just set the price at the front.