Real Estate
Building Stronger Communities
OPAL offers two forms of direct assistance for those working on transformative real estate projects, with a particular focus on adaptive reuse transactions eligible for historic tax credits (HTCs).
Property Development Assistance Program (PDAP)
To ensure more great projects break ground, our Property Development Assistance Program (PDAP) helps commercial property owners and emerging developers take a community-supported project from concept to construction. We provide technical assistance to people working in underserved markets, helping to navigate pre-development planning, budgeting, pro forma creation, and capital stacking. PDAP often builds upon an already developed plan to activate a property to meet community needs and improve economic vitality.
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During PDAP, our technical assistance focuses on the following:
- Producing a detailed pre-development schedule
- Building a capitalization strategy, identifying applicable tax credit incentive programs
- Building a detailed construction pro forma based on findings from pre-development activities
- Guidance on meeting social, environmental, and economic impact standards
By the end of the PDAP engagement, project leaders will typically have all materials required to secure funding from public or private investors. OPAL cannot ensure that these projects ultimately receive funding.
If you have a project that merits consideration for this program, submit it here.
For projects that meet a certain return threshold and impact standard, OPAL may discuss the possibility of financial participation from one of OPAL’s financial investment vehicles.
Capital Access
OPAL provides a unique suite of wraparound products for historic tax credit (HTC) transactions, most of which are available nationwide. While we can evaluate other deals and other capital deployment methods on a case-by-case basis, our primary lending and investment activity is around HTC transactions.
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OPAL provides a wraparound suite of three HTC-oriented capital products for eligible deals in eligible geographies that meet our underwriting criteria:
- Bridge Lending: Through our CDFI, OPAL provides bridge lending for state and federal HTC equity – and can, depending on the repayment source, bridge additional federal, state, and local credits or incentives as well. We are geography and size agnostic (as long as potential bridge loan is over $500,000), though we prioritize bridge loans where we are also able to deploy another capital product in parallel.
- Nonprofit Term Lending: OPAL has developed a loan product that helps sponsors mitigate the federal income tax consequences generated by the sale or refund of their state HTCs (and other potential state and local incentive sources). As with bridge lending, this product is geography and size agnostic. For additional details on structure, please reach out to the OPAL team at the contact link below.
- Federal HTC Equity: OPAL provides federal HTC equity through multiple partnerships with individuals and financial institutions. While we can evaluate deals of any size, we particularly focus on the projects that are “too small” for the rest of the tax credit marketplace – those under $15-20M in qualified rehab expenditures.
Though they work best together, each of our capital products functions independently – so if a sponsor needs only one or two of the three listed above, OPAL can work with other partners to customize its offering on that transaction.
While OPAL has historically deployed mezz debt, preferred equity, OZ equity, and other types of investments, at present we do not have any open vehicles deploying in these spaces.
For our family of funds to consider an investment, the project must demonstrate support from the community and be prepared to demonstrate its community impact in our underwriting process.