At the time the deal went to market, the communities were in various stages of construction, says Cary Abod, the locally based Holiday Fenoglio Fowler LLC director who helped broker the deal for the borrower--with executive managing director Jody Thornton and associate director John Ahmed, based in Dallas. After it got acquired by Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers, Archstone obtained additional financing. When it was a REIT, the development capital came from its internally funded credit facilities, explains Abod. "When it was taken private, the capitalization structure changed."

The communities were originally part of a five-property portfolio the HFF team took out to market to obtain a straight construction loan, according to Abod. "We wanted to have a single lending source for the five properties, but the market didn't let us do that," he says. "We ended up splitting the portfolio up, and TIAA had a construction-to-perm program where we could do it all in house. It was sort of a one-stop-shop."

Because TIAA wanted to keep the loan on its books for some time, as opposed to doing a straight construction loan, the firms had to get creative. "We were able to get Archstone and TIAA to see eye to eye, and worked some flexible prepayment into the deal," Abod relates. "It was a bit of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, but they both got something they wanted, which was flexibility and a single source for an execution." If Archstone wanted to sell one of the assets, he adds, it has the freedom to do so.