“Like Drake said, ‘praying for my downfall won’t make you a religious man.’” - Swapnil Agarwal

Don’t have most of the deets yet, but you gotta give the man credit for pulling this off: Prominent syndicator Swapnil Agarwal of Nitya Capital has landed a $700M CMBS fixed-rate refi originated by Citi, backed by 18 Sunbelt properties. The specific properties weren’t ID’d in the release, but as of March ‘24 Nitya had been in the midst of reworking a $356M CMBS loan on a 12-property, 2,700-unit portfolio – at the time, he said he needed some time to work out some of the rate-cap issues.

Agarwal is one of the players whose demise has been loudly predicted, and you can almost touch the chip on his shoulder when he’s got good news to share. “This one took a long time coming,” he wrote, “but proud to have delivered in an economic and market climate where distress in real estate is a common theme.”

Nitya’s also been a prolific user of the now-closed (w/ extreme prejudice) Traveling HFC loophole, and we’d be curious to know how it’s working through that mess.

Meanwhile, speaking of distress: The Tides Equities’ principals personal debts to Starwood have mounted: After having won judgments totaling $27M+ against Sean Kia & Ryan Andrade on 2 properties in recent weeks, Starwood has won another legal battle to put the Tides lads personally on the hook for $23.7M, according to court papers reviewed by The Promote. This means that all told, Kia & Andrade’s debts to Starwood have broken the $50M threshold. Not only is this Val Kilmer’s magic retirement number in the very good, very bad movie The Saint, it’s also the kind of sum that would wipe out most syndicators, even those who’ve juiced fees on billions of dollars in deals.

Starwood moved the fastest, but there are other lenders lining up to collect from Kia & Andrade, among them Rialto & Acres Capital. Each decision that goes against the sponsors is further legal precedent for the lenders, so we shall see where this goes.

While agency-lending dealmakers (and Bill Ackman) are salivating over the prospect of a privatized Fannie & Freddie, Democratic lawmakers are asking FHFA director Bill Pulte to cool it: a group of senators including Elizabeth Warren & Chuck Schumer wrote to Pulte Thursday urging that he pause ⏸ any privatization efforts until after he’s briefed Congress, per Bloomberg. “Hasty and poorly planned changes to the Enterprises could dramatically increase costs for families seeking to purchase a home,” they wrote. The warning comes after POTUS’ announcement last month that he was working on taking the GSEs public, though specifics of how that would work weren’t offered. (Trump mentioned implicit guarantees; the industry is hoping for an explicit federal backstop.)

The letter may have been much ado about nothing. Unwinding the GSEs is a hugely complex exercise, and some lenders expect that even if it were to happen, it’s a ways away. “This is not an easy web to untangle,” Benefit Street Partners’ Mike Comparato, who just bought agency lender NewPoint, told The Promote in a conversation that drops next week on the pod.  “I'm sure it can be done, but it is infinitely more complicated than just the headline that's ‘we're just gonna take 'em private.’”

Meanwhile, Fannie & Freddie are both looking to ramp up dealmaking, tweaking their offerings to titillate sponsors, per CMA: Both intend to hit their $73B caps this year, and those caps could even be raised by the FHFA. Both have rejigged their products to allow more proceeds to flow to borrowers, among other nip/tucks to boost their appeal. “The quotes we’re getting from the agencies have never been more aggressive,” one lender told the publication. 💃

Side note: The cult of personality around the agencies under the Trump admin. is such an interesting shift. Pulte’s a press magnet – see here, here, here. Meanwhile, did anyone even know the previous FHFA director’s name? 🎭

An extraordinary development here: The Trump administration has given its blessing to an EB-5 petition tied to a Kushner Cos. megaproject in Jersey City, one that uses a new structure devised by EB-5 regional center bigwig US Immigration Fund (Nick Mastroianni). The structure would allow EB-5 visa green card petitioners to kick in just $500K upfront, and finance the rest ($300K to hit the $800K min threshold) through a partner lender. “While many EB-5 regional centers claim to offer “USCIS-approved” loan programs, few have successfully defended their models under the scrutiny of USCIS,” Nicholas Mastroianni III said in the firm’s announcement. (If USIF has a structure that makes the fundraising less of a regulatory headache for developers, that is a major edge.)

You might recall that this same project, the 1,700-unit One Journal Square, was the scene of major EB-5 hoopla in ‘17, when Nicole Kushner Meyer referenced her brother Jared’s White House role during a pitch to Chinese investors in Beijing. The firm abandoned its quest for $150M in EB-5 financing shortly after all that. Now, of course, the political environment is way more permissive – Kushner CEO Laurent Morali told TRD he doesn’t see “any issue whatsoever” w/ tapping EB-5 funds, though he noted it’s a “very, very small piece of our capital stack” for the now nearly $1B project. 🤷

All this is happening as POTUS has floated killing off EB-5 entirely and replacing it w/ a $5M “gold card.”

The Promote has declared this “the season of pref,” and here’s another fun one out of Manhattan: Brookfield is coming into the 860K sf office building at 63 Madison at a $400M valuation ($463 / 🦶 ), per TRD. The publication frames the deal (Newmark-brokered) as a stake sale, but CO’s depiction of it as a pref play sounds more on the money. Brookfield’s coming in at a valuation well south of what the property was worth in ‘16, when George Comfort and Loeb Partners sold Jamestown a stake at $700+/ 🦶

That’s the “offense” part of the Brookfield playbook. Meanwhile, on defense, the company has sold one of its long-suffering DTLA towers, the 1.1M sf, 52-story Figueroa at Wilshire, at a sharply discounted valuation of just $210M, or $200/ 🦶 – its purchase price in ‘05 was $360M ($330/ 🦶 ), per CoStar data. The buyer here is interesting: Uncommon Developers is headed by Ryan Hekmat & Jason Larian, the son-in-law and son respectively of billionaire toy mogul Isaac Larian (of Bratz fame for the parents out there) 🎎 . Such men w/ deep pockets ™ can buy prime properties on basis and wait for the market to come back – the Figueroa property, while anchored by PwC, is just 75% leased. Newmark brokered the deal for Brookfield, while Colliers repped the buyer – Colliers’ Jordan Garcia noted to CoStar that the deal involved a deed-in-lieu and seller financing.

Eid Mubarak to those who celebrate! 🐏