Greystone Closes $901M CLO Offering Secured by 28 Multifamily Properties

Greystone has come to the market with the largest commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation (CRE CLO) offering in the firm’s history. 

Earlier this week, the lender closed Greystone CRE Notes 2025-FL4, a $901.3 million CLO secured by 28 bridge loans on more than two dozen multifamily properties across 16 states. 

Wells Fargo Securities, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Securities, Atlas SP Securities, Natixis Securities Americas and UBS Securities all served as the lead managers on the offering, while Capital One Securities served as a co-manager.

This is Greystone’s seventh CLO offering in the last eight years and the 37-year-old firm’s largest to date. 

Ross Gusler, head of corporate finance and capital markets at Greystone, told Commercial Observer that his firm had been working on this deal for several months and that given the market volatility in recent weeks, Greystone aimed to pounce on the opportunity of “a quiet period” of lower volatility to launch the offering. 

“We’ve been in this market eight years, maintaining a clean reputation and having well-performing deals,” said Gusler. “[This offering] allowed us to access a very wide investor base … It was a combination of a quiet period in the market, strong reputation for ourselves and good credit quality portfolio.”

Gusler emphasized that CLO investors were eager to participate in an actively managed CLO with a three-year reinvestment period, and that the firm secured participation from 34 different investor groups. He added that the bond was 3.5x oversubscribed than the most recent Greystone CLO offering. 

“It’s a level of investor interest that we haven’t seen outside of the peak of the capital market activity in 2021,” said Gusler. 

The $901.3 million CLO is collateralized by 13 whole loans and 15 loan participations from Greystone secured by 28 multifamily properties. These include multifamily assets in Georgia (13.5 percent of the pool), New Jersey (11.6 percent), Texas (10.5 percent), North Carolina (10.1 percent), Idaho (6.4 percent), Maryland (6.4 percent) and Pennsylvania (6.4 percent), among assets in other states 

The CLO is financed by floating-rate debt, and structures its bonds as investment grade (or above) assets, with protections in place for investors. When one part of the CLO becomes impaired, those cash flows coming to the seller from the retained notes and preferred shares are cut off and converted to principal for the other participants.

CRE CLO issuance reached $8.4 billion year-to-date through the first quarter of 2025, according to ratings agency KBRA, which nearly matched the total volume from 2024. This performance comes on the heels of 2023’s record-low performance of $6.7 billion in CRE CLO issuance in that entire year. 

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.