Greystone assembles $167M financing for Related Urban's Gallery at Lummus Parc

Related Urban Development Group has closed $167 million of construction financing for a two-tower apartment project on Northwest First Street in downtown Miami, and the roster behind the money says as much about the affordable housing capital market as the deal itself. The stack names Greystone in three separate roles, BlackRock's impact platform and Freddie Mac once each, and no bank at all.

The financing runs through Greystone's affordable housing lending platform, Commercial Observer first reported: Greystone Housing Impact Investors supplied an $80 million construction loan through a joint venture with the BlackRock Impact Opportunities Fund, Greystone Real Estate Capital contributed $27.4 million in 4 percent Low-Income Housing Tax Credits to the 257-unit Gallery at Lummus Parc, and a Freddie Mac forward tax-exempt loan arranged by Greystone is intended to retire construction costs with the credit equity, putting the permanent lender's name on the project before construction starts.

Only two of those pieces come with dollar figures, which together account for $107.4 million of the $167 million headline; the Freddie Mac forward is not sized, so the instrument that will hold the asset longest is the one without a number attached, nor does the coverage say whether the enumerated pieces sum to the announced total. Against 257 units, $167 million works out to roughly $650,000 a unit.

Gallery at Lummus Parc pairs interconnected towers of 30 and 27 stories, which is 257 apartments across 57 floors and works out to fewer than five units a floor, a configuration that suggests larger layouts than a conventional downtown rental tower. Roughly 83 percent of the units are set aside at affordability levels spanning 20 percent to 100 percent of area median income, a band wide enough to hold deeply restricted households and workforce renters in the same building, with the rest outside the set-aside. The amenity list is the full market-rate package—coworking space, a health club, a rooftop pool, grilling areas, a pickleball court and outdoor fitness—and completion is slated for late 2028 at 395 Northwest First Street, near the Government Center Metrorail station and Brightline's Miami Central, according to Greystone.

Three products from one shop is the pitch Greg Voyentzie, chief executive of Greystone Real Estate Capital, made in a statement, saying the deal shows what the firm can achieve when it brings "Greystone's affordable housing, tax credit equity and agency financing capabilities under one platform." For a sponsor, that means a single counterparty for a package otherwise assembled from a construction lender, a tax credit syndicator and an agency servicer, with the construction spread, the equity placement and the servicing landing with the same firm.

The appeal of that integration grows as banks pull back from multifamily: Trepp's second-quarter review, covered in August, found six of ten community banks running off multifamily loans, an opening that specialty lenders and credit funds have been moving into. At Lummus Parc the construction dollar belongs to Greystone Housing Impact Investors and BlackRock rather than to a bank, and the exit belongs to the agency, which this publication has argued is consistent with the apartment maturity wall resolving as a structured-finance market rather than a distress market; this project sits at the opposite end of that pipe, with the structure assembled before the first draw so the 2028 exit never has to be negotiated in 2028.

Miami has been a receptive market for non-bank senior money: in September, $114 million BridgeInvest refinancing on a Miami Beach office asset closed, with a private credit fund taking the stabilized position and the remaining space's outcome depending on a municipal vote. Lummus Parc is the residential version, with the largest named piece of its stack supplied by a specialty lender and an impact fund instead of a bank's construction group.

Agency forwards have become a familiar instrument on this desk: in August an $8.018 million unfunded Freddie Mac forward on a Battle Creek workforce housing project locked the takeout before construction began at a former Kmart site, and Lummus Parc is a denser and costlier version of the same maneuver. Jeff Englund, an executive vice president at Greystone, described the Freddie Mac piece as providing "a clear path to long-term permanent financing while the project moves through construction and toward stabilization."

The borrower is a Related Group affiliate, and the parent has been busy in South Florida: in August Related Group started a 494-home remake of Boca Raton's former Office Depot campus, and the house's records show a $33 million Related Group closing on Sept. 21 and six Greystone entries, the most recent a $35.4 million closing on Sept. 25. Tony Del Pozzo, vice president of finance at Related Urban, credited Greystone's combination of construction financing, credit equity and a path to long-term agency financing with moving the project forward.

Where this sits in the multifamily trade the house has been tracking is a separate question: apartment prices are settling on rent rolls and jobs bases, and patient capital is buying the 2028-29 supply gap at today's cap rates. Lummus Parc delivers into that window, but with 83 percent of its units outside a market rent roll and its economics set by 4 percent credit pricing and an agency takeout, it will not register in a cap-rate conversation at all. What it does show is that the whole stack, from construction debt supplied by a specialty lender and an impact fund to permanent money supplied by an agency, now comes from non-bank intermediaries inside a single closing, and its test arrives in late 2028, when the towers deliver and 83 percent of the units have to lease inside a band running from 20 percent to 100 percent of area median income.