Marc Belsky Ltd
New York
$23,900,000
Opportunistic — LIC Development
We received a call from a client in late December of 2018 that they had just gone into a hard contract on a parcel of land in LIC that was located in an Opportunity Zone. They were scheduled to close in March 2019, and they were looking to retain us to secure equity for the project.
The challenge with the deal was that despite the fact that it was located in an Opportunity Zone, and was an “as of right” development, many investors don’t like coming into a deal until it’s shovel-ready, which it would not be at the scheduled closing time. Given the recent announcement of Amazon plotting its flag in LIC, we were able to ride the coattails of the announcement and, notwithstanding the typical challenges mentioned, bring an investor into the deal to close at the scheduled time.
However, before we knew it, Amazon pulled out of NYC in February, and our deal suddenly came to a screeching halt. With some creative deal structuring, we were able to convince the investor to make a loan to the client, giving him the ability to still close on the land on time, while at the same time, in exchange for the loan, providing the investor an option to still invest the equity once things settled down. Ultimately the investor picked up their option which resulted in an investment of $23,900,000 of equity into the project.
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