Tishman's $340M Franklin refi prices leased trophy

Tishman Speyer has refinanced The Franklin, its two-tower West Loop office campus, with a $340 million single-asset, single-borrower CMBS loan, according to IREI — a deal that prices the property as a leased trophy in a market still sorting winners from commodities.

JPMorgan led the financing, with Bank of America and Deutsche Bank as co-lenders, and the five-year floating-rate loan — two-year initial term, three 12-month extension options — pays off The Franklin's existing loan and funds ongoing leasing, the market's current answer to office debt: lend against income, then leave the door open on duration.

The leasing momentum is the reason the loan works: since June 2025, Tishman Speyer has secured 460,000 square feet of new leases and extensions at The Franklin, pushing the 2.5 million-square-foot campus to 84 percent leased. Tishman Speyer managing director Nooshin Felsenthal tied the result to "continued demand for premier, amenity-rich workplaces in prime locations," a tenant roster — The Options Clearing Corporation, Robert W. Baird, Amazon Web Services, Guggenheim Partners, and The Trade Desk — that reads like the list of credits that make office CMBS underwriting possible.

For office debt, the lease is now the collateral. The point landed last week when PRP Real Assets and Riyad Capital refinanced 777 Hidden Ridge with a $250 million CMBS loan that priced a lease whose tenant had already left, and The Franklin sits at the opposite end of that trade: its collateral is a run-rate.

The Franklin fits the trophy-versus-commodity bifurcation that has defined office refinancing: 60 stories at 227 W. Monroe Street and 34 at 222 W. Adams Street, a redesigned atrium and lobby, and a tenant roster heavy on financial and tech credit, a mix the market just priced at $340 million of single-asset CMBS debt.

But the loan's maturity structure deserves as much attention as the lease-up: five years floating, with a two-year initial term and three one-year extensions, is a two-year answer to a longer question. If the first extension option comes due with the floating curve higher than today's, Tishman either pays up or returns to the market with less runway — the 84 percent occupancy is the collateral, the extension option the hedge.

That makes this refinancing another data point for the refinancing-wall thesis: as this publication has argued, the wall is being financed rather than foreclosed, but the next hard-maturity cohort turns it from a liquidity problem into a rates problem. The Franklin loan is a five-year structure designed to be solved in two.

For Tishman Speyer, the deal caps a summer of monetizing position rather than waiting for the broad market: the Tishman Speyer-Bellco venture's Boston exit — the sale of the entitled 232 A Street parcel to P&G Gillette for $99.3 million — monetized approvals rather than construction, and here the firm is monetizing leasing momentum rather than appraisal reset.

The two-year initial term puts the first extension decision in 2028, and that decision will be priced off the curve that now dominates office refinancing economics. The Franklin's next clearing price will be written in basis points, not square feet.