Greystone closes $35.37 million Freddie Mac loan for Grand Lifestyles' Naperville acquisition

Greystone has closed a $35.37 million Freddie Mac loan backing Grand Lifestyles' acquisition of The Ponds of Naperville, a 216-unit apartment property in Naperville, Illinois, Connect CRE first reported. Eric Rosenstock, a senior managing director at Greystone, originated the financing, which across the unit count works out to roughly $164,000 a door.

Built in 1988, the property is a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments, and 164 of the 216 units have already been renovated with stainless steel appliances, quartz countertops, gray cabinetry and vinyl flooring. That renovation count shapes the loan. Just over three-quarters of the rent roll has been through a capital program already, which suggests a buyer paying for income in place rather than funding a full renovation after closing.

Rosenstock's case for the deal rests on rents: suburban Illinois, he said, remains one of the few markets experiencing organic rent growth, driven largely by a lack of new supply and strong underlying multifamily fundamentals, and The Ponds gave Grand Lifestyles a well-maintained community in an established Chicago-area submarket. He also noted the two firms had worked together before, and that Greystone was pleased once again to finance the growth of Grand Lifestyles' portfolio.

Naperville is a small loan, but it lands against a larger shift. Community banks have been running off their multifamily books — Trepp's second-quarter review found six of ten trimming the exposure — and the agencies have kept writing into that gap. Greystone's bigger deals show the same instinct at scale: its $167 million financing for Related Urban's Gallery at Lummus Parc paired an $80 million construction loan with BlackRock's impact fund, $27.4 million in tax credits and a Freddie Mac forward, with no bank in the group. That is agency and alternative capital doing the work banks did a cycle ago, and the pattern holds across the lender's book, from market-rate apartments to HUD-insured skilled nursing.

The underwriting is rent, not trade scarcity; apartments are being repriced on rent rolls and jobs bases rather than on how few buildings change hands. Fifty-two units sit outside the renovation count. Whether Grand Lifestyles finishes them, and at what yield against debt already sized to in-place income, is what the next version of this file will show.