There is a proverb of uncertain origin that says… may you live in interesting times. That was the case for Sims Mortgage Funding in 2018, as we closed loans across all three HUD mortgage insurance platforms; expanded our financial advisory and consulting activities in connection with the proposed sale of two skilled nursing facilities and a hospital; and, are currently weathering a partial shutdown of the Federal government – including HUD – that started in December and is now the longest on record. The highlights –
- Our largest loan was $45,474,000 for the Baton Rouge General Medical Center. It closed on the last day of the year, during the shutdown. Stay tuned – how we pulled this off will be the subject of a future article.
- Our smallest loan was $22,128,200 for the Artis Great Falls Assisted Living, a memory care facility in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. We teamed up with Artis’s primary lender, Eagle Bank, to flawlessly execute a bridge-to-HUD financing in which Artis leveraged approximately $10.6 million of equity in the property and in turn, Eagle was taken out with our HUD-insured loan nine months later.
- We completed our 23rd HUD-insured multifamily financing for Vintage Realty Company for Elan at Terra Bella, a 178-unit market-rate property in Covington, LA, on the fast-growing North Shore of the New Orleans metropolitan area. Terra Bella will be part of a Traditional Neighborhood Development, which combines retail, commercial, office and housing organized around a town square or other common area.
- We have been engaged by a for-profit Southern California hospital group to assist them obtain HUD approval of their purchase of Parkview Community Medical Center, a 191-bed acute care hospital in Riverside, CA. We closed two loans for Parkview in 2011 and 2017 that will be assumed by the purchaser as part of the sale.
- And on the East Coast, we are assisting Hackensack-Meridian Health System, the largest healthcare provider in New Jersey, and Tandem Management restructure the ownership and management of two Tandem-owned and managed skilled nursing facilities through the partial sale of the facilities and the assumptions of four HUD-insured loans on the properties originated by SMF in 2009 and 2011.
The not-so-highlight –
- As a result of the partial shutdown, mortgage insurance applications are not being reviewed, loans for which mortgage insurance commitments have been issued are not being closed, and HUD approvals on a range of other matters – like transfers of properties, loan prepayments, and construction draw releases – are not being granted.
Ever the optimists, we’re hoping that our next article refers to the shutdown in the past tense. If not, you might see some of the SMF team’s favorite recipes and other personal musings in this space!