Walker & Dunlop closes $630.6M Fannie Mae refinancing for IMT's nine properties

Walker & Dunlop arranged $630,618,000 of fixed-rate Fannie Mae loans for IMT Capital to refinance nine apartment properties across six states, a sequence of closings that ran from May 1 to Sept. 1 and was announced together Monday.

The 3,528 units behind the loans sit in Florida, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, California and Tennessee, which puts the aggregate at roughly $178,700 of debt per unit. Each loan carries identical terms: a five-year fixed rate, interest-only payments for the full term, and a 35-year amortization schedule.

Interest-only for the life of a five-year loan means nothing retires. The balance at maturity is the balance at closing, so all nine are balloons landing between May and September of 2031. IMT buys the cash flow that amortization would otherwise absorb and defers the refinancing decision five summers out, a proceeds-maximizing structure that works only on assets whose income the lender already believes in.

Matthew Wallach, one of the Walker & Dunlop bankers on the deal, framed the sameness as the point: "Working alongside IMT Capital and Fannie Mae, we were able to execute multiple financings while providing a structure tailored to IMT's broader portfolio strategy," he said. The Capital Markets Real Estate Finance team on the deal was led by Cory Wizenberg, Wallach, Stephen West, Walker Layne, AJ Wright and Sebastian Tamayo. The financings closed as nine separate transactions rather than a single portfolio loan, coordinated over the four-month window, so pricing was struck on nine different days and the terms held steady through all of them.

It is also the second time in about a year that this borrower and this originator have run the same play. IMT took a Walker & Dunlop-arranged portfolio refinancing of comparable scale in the second half of 2025, according to the coverage, which suggests the first execution did what the sponsor needed and that the agency channel is now IMT's default. Connect's caption identifies IMT Desert Ridge in Phoenix, a property IMT acquired in January 2025, as representative of the portfolio, placing the sponsor's acquisitions in the same Sun Belt markets it is now financing.

The agency book's performance is the backdrop: the Mortgage Bankers Association's latest reading on Oct. 1 put Fannie and Freddie multifamily delinquency under 1% — both edged up and both stayed below that line — while the CMBS conduit rate sat at 6.53%. A book that is not producing delinquencies is a book where a lender does not hesitate over 3,528 units in six states, and that gap in credit performance between the two channels decides where a sponsor of stabilized apartments goes to refinance.

Community banks, meanwhile, have been walking away from the asset class: Trepp's second-quarter review found six of ten of them running off multifamily loans, a trend this publication covered in August as an opening for private lenders. The retreat also hands the plain-vanilla refinancing of good multifamily assets to the agency channel by default, because the balance-sheet lender that would once have competed for a five-year fixed-rate loan on a stabilized property is no longer bidding. Private credit can win the transitional and value-add business; the stabilized portfolio with a clean rent roll goes to Fannie.

The refinancing wall turns the transaction into the routine version of a roll. Maturing debt is being resolved less through distress sales than through new paper that pushes the maturity out, and borrowers holding performing assets get the best version of that trade. Permanent financing on leased multifamily is what this market rewards — the same conclusion that followed from the $180 million takeout for FIU student housing in September — and IMT is running that trade nine times at once.

The coverage does not disclose loan-to-value, debt yield or the properties' valuations, so the leverage sitting behind those 2031 balloons is not visible from here. What is visible is the shape of the exposure: nine loans maturing in a single five-month window, spread across six states that do not share a rent cycle, an insurance market or a property tax regime. Geographic diversity hedges any one market turning; it does not hedge credit conditions in 2031.

The deal shows what the top of the agency market will do at scale: an agency lender and its originator will run nine properties in six states through four months of closings on one structure for a repeat sponsor, and at $178,700 of debt a unit the per-asset size stays small enough to underwrite on a template. The next move belongs to IMT, since a sale into the current basis would clear the 2031 stack while another refinancing would push it out again.