Multifamily construction financing is notoriously tight, and while large developers can typically secure financing, smaller developers are struggling. Walker & Dunlop's Gabriel Weinert, senior vice president in the capital markets group, recently secured $109 million in construction financing for 11 development projects in California, Louisiana and Texas for middle-market and boutique developers. We sat down with Weinert to talk about securing construction financing for this group of borrowers.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about these recent multifamily development deals and the trends you are seeing in the market.

Gabriel Weinert: One theme that we are seeing is that some of the boutique or middle-market real estate developers or sponsors are accessing higher leverage debt and structured equity transactions to do residential and multifamily developments in secondary and tertiary locations. Financing for these types of assets has been very constrained, and it is particularly hard to find when you are trying to maximize leverage and limited partner equity and reduce the sponsor's equity. This translates into much more structured debt and equity than in more conventional real estate financings. Another theme on these deals is that it the larger money center banks, such as Bank of America or JP Morgan, weren't interested in some of these deals, so we needed to bring in a regional or community bank or a family office or boutique private equity fund. In addition to that, we needed to bring in mezzanine or preferred equity for the client to accomplish their financing goals.