Walker & Dunlop Provides $164M in Freddie Financing for Connecticut Multi-Family Properties

January 31, 2012
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

The 133-unit Montoya Apartments in Branford, Ct.

Walker & Dunlop L.L.C. has come through for Principal Management Partners with a $163.8 million loan package for the refinancing of a four-property apartment portfolio in Connecticut. The group of assets encompasses a total of 1,170 residential units.

Two of the properties, the 349-unit Hoyt Bedford Apartments and the 238-unit Morgan Manor Apartments, are located in Stamford, while the 450-unit Seramonte Apartments and the 133-unit Montoya Apartments are sited in Hamden and Branford, respectively.

Four properties, four loans. Walker & Dunlop provided the financing under Freddie Mac’s Capital Markets Execution Program. The loans, at loan-to-value ratios ranging from 79.2 percent to 80 percent, were structured with a seven-year term with two-years interest only and a 30-year amortization.

The private lending community certainly made its presence known as a viable option for certain borrowers in the thriving multifamily market last year, but Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae remain strong go-to sources. “Banks continue to lend but generally speaking only on shorter duration loans with floating interest rates,” Willy Walker, president and CEO of Walker & Dunlop, noted during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call in November. “I expect that, during the remainder of 2011 and into the first part of 2012, we are going to see a continuation of the current competitive landscape, where the agencies are lending, banks are trying to understand the regulatory landscape and deploy short-term floating rate debt, life insurance companies continue to actively lend, and CMBS exists but not as a major market force.”

Walker & Dunlop, a Fannie Mae DUS, Freddie Mac Program Plus and MAP- and LEAN-approved FHA lender, closed 2011 with a loan origination volume of $4 billion, $2.7 billion of which was through the two government-sponsored enterprises. Walker added of the current lending climate, “This landscape allows Walker & Dunlop to do what we do best, grow our agency lending business with limited pricing pressure from other sources of capital and expand our business into new areas of lending as a publicly traded non-bank finance company.”