Greystone, a leading commercial real estate finance company, is working on its first national multi-investor low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) fund.
Aiming to raise approximately $100 million, the initial fund is expected to close at the end of this year or early next year, says Greg Voyentzie, CEO of Greystone Real Estate Capital.
The company is also working on several proprietary funds after recently completing its third-party sponsor review required by investors.
Voyentzie, who was hired to launch Greystone’s LIHTC platform, is joined at the company by Sarah Laubinger, chief operating officer, and Todd Jones, chief investment officer. The industry veterans made the move after years of working together at Boston Financial, a longtime LIHTC syndicator.
“We’re new as a group, but we’re not new to the industry individually,” Voyentzie says. “We’ve assembled a team with deep experience across the board.”
He and Laubinger have worked together for 25 years, and they’ve worked with Jones for 15 years.
They’re starting the new LIHTC business with a clean slate but note that Greystone already has well-established roots in affordable housing as a Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal Housing Administration lender.
“What attracted us to Greystone is that it’s not a public company involved in a lot of different industries or businesses,” Laubinger says. “It’s exclusively focused on real estate, and they have decades of experience in affordable housing in the U.S. Affordable housing is part of our DNA as a company, and we all share the same mission and values. That’s what we care about.”
There may be times when Greystone will provide both debt and equity to a deal, but, in many cases, the firm may just offer one piece of the capital stack. Getting into tax credit syndication isn’t about boosting the lending business but rather expanding Greystone’s financing toolkit for developers, according to the executives.
The LIHTC team is also working on building proprietary products that will help clients evaluate deals and deal terms more effectively. Such new tools “will be around underwriting, creating more efficiencies, and giving investors the ability to analyze deals in a different way on the front end as well as with the ongoing management of their portfolios,” Jones says.
Looking ahead, the firm also hopes to be more intentional about increasing the impact of each development.
“It’s always in the back of our mind not only about reporting on impact but thinking about ways to make each community more impactful for residents,” Voyentzie says. “A goal of ours is to figure out ways to facilitate and provide property-specific resident programming and services.”
