Real Estate

Building Stronger Communities

OPAL offers two forms of direct assistance for those working on transformative real estate projects.

Property Development Assistance Program (PDAP)

To ensure more great projects break ground, our Property Development Assistance Program (PDAP) helps commercial property owners and emerging developers take a community-supported project from concept to construction. We provide technical assistance to people working in underserved markets, helping to navigate pre-development planning, budgeting, pro forma creation, and capital stacking. PDAP often builds upon an already developed plan to activate a property to meet community needs and improve economic vitality.

During PDAP, our technical assistance focuses on the following:

Producing a detailed pre-development schedule
Building a capitalization strategy, identifying applicable tax credit incentive programs
Building a detailed construction pro forma based on findings from pre-development activities
Guidance on meeting social, environmental, and economic impact standards

By the end of the PDAP engagement, project leaders will typically have all materials required to secure funding from public or private investors. OPAL cannot ensure that these projects ultimately receive funding.

If you have a project that merits consideration for this program, submit it here.

For projects that meet a certain return threshold and impact standard, OPAL may discuss the possibility of financial participation from one of OPAL’s financial investment vehicles.

Capital Access

OPAL offers a variety of capital products for sponsors – from tax-advantaged bridge debt to tax credit equity solutions – to facilitate the development of catalytic real estate projects.

The OPAL corporate family and our partners offer the following types of capital for real estate projects that meet our underwriting criteria:

Tax-advantaged bridge debt (typically on historic tax credit transactions or others with subsidy tied to completion milestones)
Federal historic tax credit equity (typically for smaller historic revitalization projects)
Mezzanine debt / Preferred equity
Common equity (for both traditional and Opportunity Zone projects)

Our current priority is deploying capital to historic revitalization projects located in Alabama and across the US, but we consider other catalytic CRE opportunities on a case-by-case basis.

For our family of funds to consider an investment, the project must demonstrate support from the community. If you are the sponsor of an project that you believe merits consideration by the OPAL family of funds, please contact Becky Carpenter.