Thorofare takes the lease-up risk on a $35M Savannah industrial loan

Thorofare Capital has closed a $35 million floating-rate senior mortgage on Gateway Commerce Park, a deal whose structure says more than its dollar amount. Interest-only and cash-in, the loan sits against a lease-up of a 449,280-square-foot, two-building Class A industrial campus in Hardeeville, South Carolina, completed in 2025 and still being marketed to warehouse and distribution users.

That works out to roughly $78 a square foot of senior debt on newly built product fewer than 20 miles from the Port of Savannah, which the coverage describes as one of the largest container ports in the United States and home to North America's largest single-terminal container facility. Neither the project's total capitalization nor the sponsor's name is disclosed: the number that would show how much cushion the $78 basis actually represents, and the identity that would show who is executing the lease-up.

Floating-rate and interest-only on an asset that is not yet leased, the loan assigns rate exposure to the sponsor and keeps leasing exposure with the lender, with no amortization building equity behind the debt while the space sits empty. This is the refinancing wall in its least dramatic form, the version becoming standard: duration moving off bank balance sheets into private credit, resolved by structure rather than by discounted payoff. A completed, partially leased industrial park needs a lender willing to hold through a leasing cycle, and the compensation for that patience arrives in the coupon rather than in a distressed entry price. Thorofare is being paid to wait.

How long it waits is a leasing question, and the answer is being negotiated in a tenant's market. A market offering tenants ten to fifteen options hands the leverage to the tenant, the urgency to the landlord, and eventually the bill to the lender. Gateway's flexibility cuts both ways: configurations from about 36,000 square feet to more than 330,000 let the sponsor chase a single user for a full building or assemble a roster of smaller ones. But each lease signed sets the rent the next tenant negotiates against, and where tenants hold the options, the first signings set a ceiling as much as a floor.

At roughly $78 a foot of senior debt, Thorofare has room to be wrong about the rent, provided the sponsor can carry the vacancy long enough for the space to fill—which is what a cash-in refinance at this point in a project usually implies. The trade is a loan sized against a stabilized industrial asset and underwritten against a leasing outcome, with the rate index doing none of the credit work. The first executed lease, its size and its term, will say more about Gateway Commerce Park than any index print will.