HFF Arranges Financing for 30-Property Portfolio

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Jim Cadranell, HFF

HFF gave quite a helping hand to Paramount Realty Services recently, as Paramount, which focuses predominantly on retail real estate, acquired a 2 million-square-foot commercial portfolio in the Northeast from LMS Commercial Real Estate. HFF arranged a $221.8 million financing with a portfolio lender for the transaction on Paramount’s behalf.

HFF saw its share of interested parties. “Lenders were very attracted to the diversity that the assets provided,” Jim Cadranell, senior managing director with HFF, told Commercial Property Executive.

It has retail, it has office, it has medical office–the 30-property portfolio spans three coveted property sectors in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The purchase of the LMS collection marked Paramount’s entrée into the Central Pennsylvania market. But that’s just a part of what the loan helped accomplish.

Ultimately, the big financing package paved the way for Paramount to enhance its ownership portfolio to include a total of approximately 7.5 million square feet of commercial space valued at more than $1 billion.

HFF has certainly had a busy year so far, having already completed the arrangement of roughly 25 financing transactions. Two of the commercial real estate and capital markets services provider’s largest deals of 2015 came over the last two weeks. In addition to the Paramount transaction, this week HFF announced that on behalf of Sterling Bay, it has secured $220 million in financing from Mesa West Capital for Chicago’s 1KFulton, a 531,000 square-foot office and retail project where Google has claimed the anchor position with the pre-leasing of 358,000 square feet. And in January, HFF arranged a $103 million loan through SunTrust Bank for The JBG Cos.’ refinancing of the premier 275,000-square-foot office building at 7200 Wisconsin Ave., in Bethesda, Md., just a stone’s throw from Washington, D.C.