Terra Lands $245M Permanent Loan for Sweetwater's Upland Park

David Martin’s Terra has closed a $245 million permanent loan on the finished first phase of Upland Park, its 47-acre rental project built beside Miami-Dade County’s Dolphin Station Park and Ride Transit Terminal in Sweetwater. New York-based Slate Property Group provided the loan, paying off the $170 million construction note Terra drew in 2024 from Slate affiliate Scale Lending to build the phase.

Why it matters

A lender agreeing to take out construction debt with permanent financing is a vote of confidence in a project’s lease-up, and it comes as garden-style rentals near transit keep drawing capital in South Florida’s Miami multifamily market. Terra built Upland Park’s first phase, nine three-story garden buildings, on land it leases from Miami-Dade County rather than owns outright, a structure that ties the project’s economics directly to the transit terminal and the Dolphin Expressway interchange next door. The refinance also frees Terra’s balance sheet to move toward Phase 2 on the same site.

The numbers

The $245 million loan covers 578 completed apartments, working out to roughly $423,875 in debt per unit. More than 60 percent of the units are leased, with monthly rents starting at $2,000. The prior construction loan, $170 million from Scale Lending, funded the same 47-acre first phase beginning in 2024. Terra’s own project materials put the full Upland Park build-out, including a planned hotel and retail and commercial space beyond the residential phases, at roughly $1 billion in total project cost across a 97-year county land lease.

What’s next

Terra has a second residential phase planned for Upland Park, adding 484 more apartments, with groundbreaking expected later in 2026. Neither Terra nor Slate Property Group has disclosed financing terms for that phase yet. The Sweetwater site’s full build-out, per Terra’s own project page, is slated to eventually include more than 1,700 residences alongside the hotel and commercial components already under construction.