GSN Roundup: MBS Revolving Periods, Blackstone CMBS Loan, and Student-Housing Listing

Top stories in US CRE News this week:

Real Estate Alert – 9.30.2025 
Student-Housing Listing Is Largest in 2 Years

The nation’s priciest single-asset student-housing listing since 2023 has hit the market in Ann Arbor, Mich., with a price tag of roughly $190 million.

Beekman on Broadway has 540 units with 706 beds and serves students at the University of Michigan. The estimated valuation works out to $352,000/unit ($269,000/bed). Newmark is marketing the property for Chicago-based developer Morningside Group.

The first phase of the Beekman on Broadway project, completed in 2020 with 254 units, is 97% leased. Overall occupancy slipped to 75% in the 2024-2025 academic year after the second phase, a 286-unit addition

completed last year, was delivered later than expected. That disrupted renewals and slowed lease-up, according to marketing materials.

The broader Ann Arbor student-housing market remains strong, according to marketing materials. Purpose-built student-housing properties near the University of Michigan have averaged more than 98% occupancy over the past decade, and rents have climbed nearly 26%.

Beekman on Broadway’s studio to three-bedroom units average 714 sq ft. The average rent per unit is $2,597, or $3.64/sq ft, and the average rent per bed is $1,986.

Units have kitchens with quartz counters, stainless-steel gas ranges, wood-style plank flooring and washer/dryers. Some units have walk-in closets, bed-to-bath parity and private pet yards. Furnished units are also available.

Amenities include a pool, grills, a clubhouse lounge, game and media rooms, coworking spaces and a fitness center with Peloton bikes and yoga facilities.

There also is 4,000 sq ft of ground-floor retail space across two fully leased storefronts, generating roughly $138,000 of annual revenue.

The property is on nearly 5 acres at 1200 and 1100 Broadway Street in the Lower Town neighborhood, a half-mile from the University of Michigan Medical Campus. It is a mile from North Campus and 1.5 miles from Central Campus.

The surrounding area is dominated by 1960s-era apartment properties, and Beekman is the closest new, Class-A rental option to the medical campus, according to marketing materials. Nearby, the $920 million D. Dan and Betty Kahn Health Care Pavilion, a 12-story hospital opening in November, will add 1,600 jobs and expand Michigan Medicine’s footprint.

According to marketing materials, the University of Michigan had a record enrollment of 52,855 students in fall 2024, up 21% over the past decade. Applications for fall 2025 reached an all-time high of 105,000.

Asset Backed Alert – 9.26.2025 
MBS Adopting Longer Revolving Periods

A novel securitization structure developed by law firm Dechert is handing issuers of mortgage-backed bonds a way to extend their deals’ reinvestment periods.

Extended reinvestment periods have become a standard feature of offerings underpinned by residential transition loans. But for more-traditional transactions backed by most other types of mortgages, long reinvestment or prefunding periods have been rare.

That’s because most mortgage securitizations are structured as real estate mortgage investment conduits. Aside from rare instances of “prohibited transactions,” Remics generally are not subject to income taxes, and they offer more structuring options than some other tax-efficient vehicles. However, due to Remic rules, the reinvestment periods of such deals are limited to no more than 90 days.

This has made them unattractive vehicles for securitizations of loans investors use to buy and renovate, or to build, single-family homes or small apartment properties. Such credits, known as bridge, transition or fix-and-flip loans, typically mature within 36 months, and frequently prepay before maturity. Securitizations of transition mortgages only really work for issuers when proceeds from loan repayments can be used to acquire new loans, generally for 18 months to two years.

Sponsors of such offerings only began to consider using Remic structures for their securitizations when they wanted to expand their investor bases by obtaining credit ratings. In part, that’s because Remics allow for sequential bond payments, which can yield better ratings. The non-Remic structures that had been used for private offerings backed by transition loans distributed payments to bondholders on a pro-rata basis.

The only other tax-efficient structure that typically has allowed for sequential bond payments is a REIT, which comes with its own limitations.

To eliminate the short reinvestment-period problem that comes with Remics, Dechert developed a structure that involves the securitization trust electing to be treated as a Remic multiple times. Since each such new election comes with its own 90-day reinvestment period, the effective reinvestment period of the overall transaction is extended.

This structure, dubbed a pancake Remic by Dechert, now is offered by multiple law firms. It has been used for most rated transition-loan transactions.

Morningstar DBRS, the only rating company to date with criteria for rating transition-loan securitizations, routinely assigns low single-A grades to the senior tranches of such deals, and rates subordinate bonds as low as a low single-B.

Since the first rated deal in February 2024, U.S. issuers including Fidelis Investors, Kiavi Funding, Neuberger Berman and Pretium Partners have priced 23 transition-loan offerings totaling $6.3 billion, according to Asset-Backed Alert’s ABS Database.

Now, Dechert is speaking with clients interested in using a pancake Remic structure for securitizations of other kinds of mortgages, both residential and commercial.

“We removed one of the big disadvantages of Remics, so now people might take a second look,” Dechert partner Will Cejudo said.

Indeed, many transition-loan bond issuers who already are familiar with the pancake Remic structure routinely tap the securitization market to fund other types of mortgages.

While mortgages on stabilized properties tend to have longer terms than fix-and-flip loans, it may be attractive to structure securitizations with revolving periods in certain market environments, such as when interest rates are falling and prepayments are rising.

Alternatively, it may be attractive to structure deals with prefunding periods should either funding costs or asset prices fall quickly.

As with other types of securitizations that have prefunding or revolving periods, transition-loan securitizations have restrictions on the types of new loans that can be purchased.

Take a $256.5 million Neuberger Berman securitization that priced on Aug. 25 with Morgan Stanley, Performance Trust and Wells Fargo running the books. The deal subjects the overall revolving pool of collateral to a minimum weighted average FICO score of 735 (excluding borrowers with no score), and a maximum weighted average loan-to-cost ratio of 80%, among other criteria.

There is a downside to the pancake Remic structure: It requires compliance with all Remic provisions, including additional tax reporting for the residual tranche. Since each Remic is its own taxpayer, quarterly tax returns must be provided to the residual holders of each. For a deal with a two-year revolving period, that would involve eight separate Remics.

Also, all Remics limit the issuer’s ability to restructure collateral loans.

Commercial Mortgage Alert – 9.26.2025 
Rentals Back Latest Blackstone CMBS Loan

Blackstone, already the CMBS market’s most prolific borrower, has lined up $465 million of floating-rate debt from Morgan Stanley and Natixis to refinance five apartment complexes in three states.

The 1,717-unit portfolio spans three properties in Florida, one in Cambridge and another in suburban Atlanta. The debt package, which hasn’t closed yet, would comprise a $435 million senior mortgage and a $30 million mezzanine loan.

The financing would have an initial term of two years, plus three single-year extension options. The lenders, led by Morgan Stanley, intend to securitize the interest-only senior portion via a single-borrower CMBS offering that could price next week (BX 2025-OMG).

Blackstone will use the proceeds to help pay off $465.8 million of existing senior and mezzanine loans on the properties. The New York-based investment manager also has committed to pony up $7.8 million of cash to satisfy the rest of the outstanding balance and to cover an estimated $6.8 million of closing costs.

The collateral pool was appraised recently at $637 million, including a 1.04% premium the properties presumably would command if sold as a package. That would put the loan-to-value ratio for the overall financing in the works at 73%. The aggregate value of the individual properties was pegged at $630.4 million, which would lift the LTV to 73.8%.

The projected debt yield tied to the pending debt package would be 6.5%, and the anticipated debt-service coverage ratio would be 0.99 to 1, based on the portfolio’s underwritten net operating income of $30.2 million.

The occupancy levels at the underlying properties run from 90% to 95%, with average in-place rents ranging from $2,738 for studio units and $2,203 on one-bedroom apartments to $2,800 for three-bedroom floor plans.

The largest property in the pool is the 528-unit Elevate, at 1 Leighton Street in the massive Cambridge Crossing mixed-use development near Boston. The high-rise, built in 2006, accounts for $15.1 million, or 50%, of the portfolio’s underwritten NOI.

The other collateral properties include the 298-unit Arbor Place, in Douglasville, Ga., which was built in 2002 and which represents 9.5% of the pool’s NOI. The Florida complexes are the 299-unit Adley at Lakewood, in Sarasota (built in 2019, 12.2% of NOI); the 296-unit Milano Lakes, in Naples (2018, 17.3%) and the 296-unit Cue Luxury, in Jacksonville (2020, 11.0%).

Blackstone has long been the most-active borrower in the CMBS market. So far this year, securitization lenders have priced 14 single-borrower issues, totaling $16.69 billion, backed by loans to Blackstone, its affiliates and/or partnerships on U.S. properties. But none of those deals were collateralized by loans in the multifamily sector, according to Commercial Mortgage Alert’s CMBS Database.