Lone Star PACE closes $64.8M on six Texas projects

Lone Star PACE closed $64.8 million in Texas PACE Program financing in the first half of 2026, backing roughly $279 million in commercial real estate investment across six Texas projects, according to Connect CRE.

The projects: a Holiday Inn Express in Pilot Point, MCM Elegante in Beaumont, Ashford Yard in Houston, Cold Storage Seabrook, Vesgro Data Center in Irving and Maranello Luxury Garages in Plano. Together they span hospitality, retail, industrial, data centers and specialty development. The report does not identify the property owners or construction lenders. Six closed deals in a half-year is a steady clip for a specialty PACE lender.

The Texas PACE Program finances energy and water conservation improvements through a voluntary property assessment. C-PACE can fund up to 35 percent of a project's capital stack, and the money is available for new construction, redevelopment and retrofit projects, according to the program. Owners use it for high-performance building systems; the energy and water savings are what make the assessment work. It is a structure that rewards conservation: the bigger the savings, the easier the assessment is to carry.

For a construction lender, the 35 percent ceiling is the number to run. Across these six transactions, the PACE layer comes to roughly 23 percent of the $279 million total investment — a senior slice that can shrink the mezzanine piece or lower the equity check. A layer that size changes the underwriting on the construction loan.

The asset mix adds context. A data center, a cold-storage plant and a hotel have very different energy loads, yet they all drew PACE money inside one six-month window. No two of these assets underwrite the same way, which makes the uniform use of PACE across them the more telling detail. That breadth suggests C-PACE is no longer a retrofit niche, even though the report does not specify which projects are ground-up. For principals watching construction finance, a near-quarter senior assessment in energy-hungry assets is the kind of term that bends a capital stack.