Principal lends $32M on a Queens grocery center its owner has held for 26 years

Principal Financial Group is providing $32 million for Springnex Plaza, a 96,028-square-foot grocery-anchored retail property in Springfield Gardens, Queens, in a financing arranged by Northmarq’s New York Metro Debt + Equity team and led by Robert Delitsky and Charles Cotsalas for Mattone Group Springnex LLC, according to Connect CRE. The property sits on 5.58 acres that Mattone developed in 2000 and has held ever since, and Delitsky told Connect CRE the owner has done “a fabulous job maintaining very strong occupancy.”

The fully leased, multi-tenant roster mixes grocery, dining, healthcare, and services around a Stop & Shop anchor, with Ashley Stewart, IHOP, and Northwell Health among the tenants. The $32 million works out to roughly $333 a square foot, a conservative number for a fully occupied grocery center in New York City. The deal follows a day after PWD’s report that the loan refinances Springnex Plaza, and it lands days after Northmarq placed a $50.75 million refinancing on a Potomac, Maryland grocery center; two supermarket-anchored credits inside a week suggest Northmarq is working a narrow lane—grocery-anchored retail with a dominant anchor and a long-term owner—and that borrowers for that paper remain active.

Principal is underwriting a 26-year hold rather than a fresh buyer—sponsorship and a proven anchor, not an opportunistic repositioning. That fits the patient-capital story around the maturity wall: owners are refinancing with structured debt and relationship money instead of selling into a repriced market, and distress will accumulate quietly on lender books until sponsors run out of options. Springnex Plaza has not run out of options: it has a lender that knows the ownership, an anchor that draws foot traffic, and a price per foot that leaves room to operate. Plenty of retail centers cannot say any of that, and they are the ones waiting out the cycle.