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Developer Gets $14.5M From Kennedy Funding For 50 Acres in Hawaii
By James Comtois
Kennedy Funding, a Hackensack, N.J.-based direct private lender (also known as a hard money lender), has given a developer a loan for $14.5 million in order to help build on 50 acres of land in Hawaii,.
Seascape Development LLC owned five undeveloped parcels, a little more than 50 acres, on the island of Hawaii, in the city of Kailua-Kona. The property is about a mile and a half east of the Kaahumanuy Highway at the Kona International Airport entrance. Seascape's plans for that property included a possible mixed-use development of residential and retail space, a residential-only development or any number of others. In order to bring these possible plans to fruition, the developer received a loan for $14.5 million from Kennedy.
The way Kennedy works is that it typically looks at each loan on a case-by-case basis and decides if the loan is viable based on the collateral's own merits. "In that regard, we're very different from a bank," said Jeffrey Wolfer, president and co-CEO of Kennedy Funding. "Banks and other traditional lenders use a cookie-cutter approach. If your loan doesn't fall within one of their patterns, it simply doesn't get done. But our approach is to use all our expertise and experience and, if at all possible, make the deal happen."
According to Mr. Wolfer, in the case of Seascape Development, Kennedy put together a complicated collateral package to get the loan that involved several different pieces of Seascape property as collateral, as well as "a considerable amount of flexibility and creativity which, frankly, I don't think anyone else could have even touched, let alone concluded. But we made the loan, for $14.5 million and we did it fairly quickly."
John Stevens of Seascape said in a statement that he agreed with Mr. Wolfer's assessment. "Jeffrey Wolfer and [Kennedy general counsel] Jon Hornik were great, as were all of Kennedy's people. It was quite a complicated job and they worked very hard to make it happen, every step of the way. I don't think anyone else could have done it, and I'm glad they were the ones we picked. We're all relieved it's finished and we're all thankful that Kennedy knew what to do."
Kennedy Funding can issue loan commitments in as little as 24 hours, which often leads to closings in as few as five days and, in some cases when time is critical, even less. Available financing ranges from $1 million to more than $100 million, with rates as low as 12% and three points.
This was Kennedy's first Hawaiian deal.
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