Lincoln-led venture pays $450M for National Resources' tri-state portfolio

A joint venture of Lincoln Property Company, Saber-Hightower and Waterfall Asset Management paid $450 million for a National Resources portfolio, Commercial Observer reported. The deal includes four assets. Together they total more than four million square feet and sit across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The anchor is iPark 84, a business park in East Fishkill, N.Y., about 50 miles north of Manhattan. It covers 270 acres. The campus spans 1.8 million square feet and was originally built as IBM's flagship semiconductor manufacturing plant. Tenants include IBM, Samsung subsidiary eMagin and agricultural company Cal-Maine. The park has room for another 1.5 million square feet of development.

The other three assets are smaller and more particular. One sits at 761 Main Street in Norwalk, Conn. The mixed-use center spans roughly 400,000 square feet. It occupies 29 acres and is anchored by a Northwell Health medical outpatient complex. Cannondale keeps its corporate headquarters there, along with a 70,000-square-foot gym and approved multifamily development space. There is also Edgewater Harbor in Edgewater, N.J., a waterfront apartment community with 262 units. It includes 60,000 square feet of retail, such as a Sprouts Farmers Market. Trilogy Lofts adds 97 transit-oriented apartments in Yonkers, beside the Tuckahoe Metro-North station. Another 50 apartments are planned.

Putting the deal together took more than a year. Lynne Ward, National Resources' CEO, first called Saber-Hightower co-founder Marty Berger last summer about selling the properties as part of an estate sale, Commercial Observer reported. Berger described the work ahead: "We took a very long time to really get our hands around a portfolio to be able to extract all the pieces." He told the outlet that he and Jared Toothman, Lincoln's New York City metro market leader, "shook hands on it over a card table at a golf club" before the closing work began. Toothman said the deal ran longer than usual because the acreage sits across three states. Berger brought Waterfall into the partnership after pitching the opportunity to investors.

Zachary Liebmann, a partner and head of commercial real estate at Waterfall, said the price makes the acquisition the firm's largest real estate deal to date. He described the portfolio as "very complex, diverse," needing to be understood asset by asset — one reason the process ran long. The financing required a "thoughtful" approach, Liebmann said. The buyers assumed commercial mortgage-backed securities loans and balance sheet loans. There were two of each, all from Affinius Capital and covering the portfolio's multifamily properties.

A single buyer would have had to underwrite industrial, office, retail and multifamily in one package. The joint venture divides that work: Lincoln runs the properties, Waterfall supplies capital and credit expertise, and Saber-Hightower sourced the deal. Keeping the existing loans on the multifamily assets also avoided pushing those properties through a fresh financing process.

Estate dispositions run on a schedule. A portfolio sale delivers a single closing with less execution risk than a series of one-off asset auctions. That dynamic likely shaped the negotiation, though the report gives no cap rate or per-square-foot figure to test the pricing.

The sale cuts against the refinancing wave that has marked this cycle. The same week brought a record C-PACE loan in Boston anchoring an $856 million refinancing. It also brought a $482.5 million CMBS loan on scattered rental homes. Both kept assets in place. National Resources went the other way, selling its four assets as a portfolio.

The buyers now hold the development upside. iPark 84 has room for 1.5 million additional square feet. Norwalk has approved multifamily capacity, and Yonkers has 50 more units planned. The handshake was over a card table. The closing took a year. The work of extracting that value will take longer still.