Berkeley Point Provides $2.2B in Financing for Starwood-Milestone Deal

The public-to-private transaction includes a portfolio of 74 assets, built between 1974 and 2016 and containing nearly 23,000 units.

moneyBerkeley Point Capital has provided Starwood Capital Group with $2.22 billion in acquisition financing as part of Starwood Capital Group’s purchase of Milestone Apartments Real Estate Investment Trust. That deal was via a public-to-private transaction announced by the REIT at the end of April.

In that deal, Starwood—which is privately held—acquired all of Milestone’s subsidiaries and assets. Milestone was formerly a public REIT trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Starwood currently has about $51 billion in assets under management.

Berkeley Point provided financing on 74 of the assets, built between 1974 and 2016, and containing nearly 23,000 units. The majority of them are located in Texas and Florida, with the rest scattered across other states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.

Berkeley Point used Freddie Mac’s ARM product, providing 10-year floating rate financing for the portfolio. Berkeley Point and Starwood also used Freddie Mac’s Green Advantage product, which—when combined with a portion of the portfolio’s rents being affordable at 60 percent of area median income—allowed 50 percent of the loan balance to be exempt from Freddie Mac’s production cap.

Managing directors Charlie Haggard and Kevin Mignogna, and assistant vice president Peter Kurzeka, led the financing for Berkeley Point out of the company’s Irvine, Calif., office. In February, they also completed more than $250 million in acquisition financing for Starwood for the purchase of an 11-property multifamily portfolio from Holland Partners.