Catal Group Lends $23M for West Palm Beach Self-Storage Project

Woodglen Investments has secured $23 million of construction financing to build a self-storage facility in West Palm Beach, Fla., Commercial Observer has learned.

Catal Group provided the loan for Woodglen’s planned 788-unit Kirksey Commons self- storage development at 1501 North Dixie Highway, around a mile from Downtown West Palm Beach. The deal closed on Monday afternoon.  

“With no new supply of storage facilities in the downtown corridor, this Kirksey Commons will fill a critical need as Downtown continues to grow and densify,” Scott Maslin, principal at Woodglen, said in a statement. “West Palm continues to attract substantial investment across office, retail, hotel, condominium and multifamily sectors.”

Colliers arranged the transaction with a team led by Dylan Kane and Zach Redding of the brokerage firm’s New York capital markets group.

Kane noted that Kirksey Commons has already received necessary zoning approvals, which can be a difficult process in West Palm Beach due to tight city building restrictions. hen the project opens, it will be only the second self-storage facility in the Downtown West Palm Beach submarket, with the other one built in the early 2000s, he said.

“We’re pretty much the only game in town, which is huge for the supply and demand dynamics,” Kane told CO. 

The Kirksey Commons project is slated for completion in late 2026 and will be 100 percent climate-controlled, with more than 93,000 square feet of self-storage units, over 9,000 square feet of commercial flex space and 57 parking spaces. A property management operator has not been selected yet, but Kane said major players in the self-storage space have reached out with interest. 

Kane said that in addition to little competition, there is strong demand for self-storage in this section of West Palm Beach, as there are more than 6,800 residential units in the development pipeline within a two-mile radius of the property. The city is also getting a $10 billion investment from Related Companies’ founder Stephen Ross, with more than eight million square feet of office, condominium, retail and hotel developments.

“Because of all these great deal points, the lending market that we went out to was very aggressive,” Kane said. “This transaction represents 75 percent of project costs, which is on the higher side for construction, and the economics were very attractive so we had a lot of options.”

As for other developments that should pave the way for increased self-storage use in West Palm Beach, Vanderbilt University’s new graduate campus is slated to open in fall 2026, said Kane, whileCleveland Clinic’s 150-bed hospital and 120,000-square-foot outpatient center will generate around 1,000 jobs.

Catal Group closed the loan nearly a year after the family office launched its first debt fund in September 2024. Trisha Connolly Horowitz, the head of real estate lending at Catal, credited Alex Neubauer with bringing this transaction to the finish line.

“Alex was the lead for Catal Capital and navigated through challenges that arose throughout the process, always focused on the end result,” Connolly Horowitz said. “We look to build partnerships with borrowers and not just one-off transactions.”

Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com.