Nuveen Green Capital (NGC) recently closed one of the largest C-PACE financing packages on a single project.
At $290 million, NGC’s financing for The Pendry Hotel and Residences in Tampa, Florida is one of the most substantial C-PACE deals of the year. While The Pendry financing represents a major milestone for NGC, it’s just one piece of an industry that has exploded in the last decade, with C-PACE becoming a go-to financing method for projects at every stage of their life cycle. For our latest piece in our series with NGC, we spoke with the team about how The Pendry deal is emblematic of a rapidly maturing C-PACE market with unlimited potential for growth in the future.
Breaking records in Tampa
The Pendry Hotel and Residences is a 38-story mixed-use luxury hotel and condo project in Tampa, Florida, being developed by Two Roads Development.
“The financing package that we put together comprises $290 million of C-PACE, a record-breaking amount in our industry [at the time of closing], and $230 million of mortgage financing from Sculptor Real Estate,” explains Ryan Doyle, NGC’s Senior Director of Originations for the Southeast, who was responsible for originating and structuring the transaction.
In the case of Pendry Hotel and Residences, Two Roads used C-PACE mid-construction to benefit from its flexible repayment structure and the ability to finance the project in multiple tranches. The C-PACE capital funded energy-efficiency, water-efficiency and resiliency measures, while lowering the total project financing expenses.
For borrowers considering C-PACE midstream in construction, C-PACE is significantly less expensive than subordinate capital. As Doyle points out, “C-PACE capital was accretive to everyone in the stack.”
Image courtesy of Two Roads Development
More than just a feather in NGC’s cap, The Pendry deal is a milestone in the remarkable growth of the C-PACE industry as a whole. For some context, the entire output of the C-PACE industry in 2015 was just $211 million. In early 2025 it crossed $10 billion.
Perhaps counterintuitively, working on larger deals with institutional borrowers “actually results in a smoother process,” says Jonathan Kloos, NGC’s Senior Director, Lender Partnerships & New Products. “You have industry veterans at the table, and bringing them together offers the opportunity to really work well together.”
But these headline-grabbing deals are just one piece of the C-PACE puzzle.
Using C-PACE at every stage of construction
NGC specializes in helping clients take advantage of C-PACE financing no matter where their project is in the development process.
Working with C-PACE from the beginning of a project is valuable to sponsors because the fixed-rate C-PACE financing can sit with the property long-term. For example, NGC provided $40 million to Naftali Group to fund the pre-development and first phase of construction for JEM Private Residences in Miami, Florida, reducing the blended cost of capital for the project and providing liquidity.
“C-PACE is the same, independent of when you apply it,” says Kloos. “Whether it’s for ground-up construction starting at time period zero, as it was for JEM Private Residences, midstream in construction as in the case of the Pendry Hotel and Residences, or after construction as a recapitalization tool, the product is the same.”
At Bishop’s Lodge Auberge Resort in Santa Fe, New Mexico, C-PACE financing was used post-construction. NGC provided $76.2 million in C-PACE financing to recapitalize energy- and water-efficiency improvements made during the hotel’s renovation and to fund ongoing improvements. The C-PACE financing allowed for more favorable financing terms to support the resort’s continued profitability and growth.
No matter when in the lifecycle it’s used, C-PACE’s attractive terms provide similar benefits.
“Fundamentally, C-PACE is a low-cost, fixed-rate, and long-term financing product that offers borrowers clarity,” says Kloos, “which is very valuable in volatile markets.”
Looking ahead at future growth
Even as Nuveen Green Capital celebrates the size of the Pendry deal, they see it as a sign of things to come.
“Things look very good for C-PACE for a multitude of reasons,” says Kloos. “We’re involved with larger deals than Pendry, and I think that shows where the industry is headed. This can be a firmly institutional product. C-PACE provides tremendous value to Sponsors, not only because it’s low-priced capital, but it’s also fixed-rate, and very clear for everyone to understand.” C-PACE also offers flexibility in the short term with no lock out or yield maintenance period and NGC has closed alongside hundreds of banks, debt funds, life insurance companies and other lenders throughout the country to complete development capital stacks, provide incremental leverage, finance capital expenditures, or recapitalize recently completed projects. “The flexibility of capital with the ability to be deployed pre-, mid- or post-construction with loan sizes ranging from $5 million to over $300 million allows the product to be accretive across a wide range of projects. This flexibility has been critical in the rapid growth across our platform in recent years, which I expect will only accelerate moving forward” says Doyle.
As more institutional investors recognize the advantages of C-PACE, both Kloos and Doyle expect increasing adoption at the institutional level — and not just because the math makes sense.
“When you’re able to provide an incentive to somebody to do something positive, you can generally predict their behavior,” Kloos explains. “By providing incentive to make energy efficient improvements to commercial real estate, it starts that positive feedback loop.”
To explore how C-PACE financing could work for you, visit nuveen.com/greencapital.