$19,800,000 Industrial Warehouse, Salt Lake City, UT

Overview

Commercial Lending Solutions arranged $19,800,000 in permanent financing for a modern industrial warehouse in Salt Lake City, Utah. The property sits on the I-15 corridor with direct access to the broader Intermountain West distribution network and serves the growing Silicon Slopes technology and advanced-manufacturing base along the Wasatch Front. The deal closed as a fixed-rate, non-recourse permanent loan. Getting there required building a credit story that went well beyond trailing income.

The Deal

The sponsor owned a purpose-built industrial asset with genuine functional advantages: clear height and power specifications that appeal to technology-adjacent and light-manufacturing tenants, an infill-adjacent location with interstate visibility, and a rent roll that was producing strong in-place cash flow. The borrower wanted permanent, non-recourse debt sized to reflect the quality of the real estate, not just the weighted average lease term the rent roll happened to carry at origination. That distinction mattered enormously, because the two numbers were not telling the same story.

The Challenge

Industrial permanent financing at this loan size is priced and sized almost entirely off tenancy, not the collateral. Life insurance company underwriters, who consistently offer the tightest fixed-rate spreads on non-recourse permanent product, want weighted average lease term running comfortably past the midpoint of a ten-year note before they underwrite to full proceeds. The rent roll here had concentration risk. A meaningful share of occupied square footage was held by fewer tenants than a typical multi-tenant industrial deal, and near-term rollover windows were visible enough that every lender at the table started the conversation by asking how the sponsor intended to replace income if the credit story softened at expiration.

The macro picture along the Wasatch Front added another layer. A wave of speculative industrial construction had pushed vacancy off its cyclical lows in the Salt Lake metro over the prior 18 to 24 months. That context made releasing risk at rollover a real underwriting question rather than a theoretical one, and it meant lenders were not simply accepting submarket absorption history as a guarantee of re-tenanting velocity. The sponsor needed a lender that would underwrite the asset's competitive position forward, not just backward.

Running to regional bank balance sheets in parallel was the obvious fallback for recourse proceeds, but it was not a solution to the non-recourse requirement. Bank pricing at this size and loan type could not match the fixed-rate spread a life company correspondent relationship could deliver, and the sponsor had no interest in putting a personal guaranty behind a permanent loan on a stabilized asset. That constraint narrowed the field and raised the stakes on the life company process.

The Solution

Trevor Damyan at Commercial Lending Solutions ran a parallel process from the outset, taking the deal simultaneously to direct life insurance company correspondents and to regional bank balance sheets. The parallel track was deliberate. The bank conversations provided real-time market feedback on what a recourse lender would require on coverage and LTV, which gave the team a baseline for sizing the life company ask without overreaching on leverage.

Sizing was structured off a debt service coverage floor rather than a straight loan-to-value grid. When tenancy is the binding constraint, working backward from DSCR is more durable than anchoring to an appraised value that a future lender or disposition buyer may not replicate. Proceeds landed in the range that a disciplined life company underwriter could defend internally given the lease term profile, rather than at the ceiling of what the appraiser's cap rate implied.

The credit narrative was built around three things the asset had that a generic infill box did not: the functional specifications required by Silicon Slopes technology tenants (clear height, power capacity, dock configuration), the I-15 corridor location as a regional distribution node for the Intermountain West, and the depth of the demand base the asset was positioned to serve on re-leasing. The argument was not that vacancy risk did not exist. The argument was that this specific asset, in this specific location, with these specific specifications, sat at the front of the leasing queue when tenants in the target segment went to market. That framing gave the winning lender a defensible path to a longer amortization schedule and tighter spread than the rent roll's WALT alone would have supported.

The Outcome

The loan closed with a national life insurance company on a fixed-rate, non-recourse structure. The term was ten years with a 30-year amortization, and spread pricing reflected the asset quality argument rather than a haircut to account for concentration risk. The sponsor received permanent debt without a personal guaranty, at a rate structure the regional bank alternatives could not match, sized to a coverage ratio that leaves the capital stack stable through a realistic rollover scenario. The I-15 location and Silicon Slopes demand thesis ultimately gave the lender the conviction to lean in where a more generic industrial credit would have been cut back.