The Westshore Grand: how a Tampa hotel refinanced with a third of its debt in mezzanine

A 2019 loan meets a 2023 market

In March 2019 PCCP lent $53.5m against the hotel. The loan recapitalised it for the Crescent and Arden joint venture and repaid its existing debt.^6,7,8 The terms of that loan, including its rate and maturity, are not public.

By October 2023 the market had moved. In November 2022 Dexter Wood of The Plasencia Group, a Tampa Bay hotel broker, wrote that higher interest rates were "pressuring Debt Service Coverage Ratios and property valuations".¹⁴ He expected hotel refinancings to need "fresh capital in the form of new owner equity". He warned that preferred equity and gap financing "may come at a prohibitively high price".

SOFR was 5.31% on 17 October 2023, the closing date one deal database gives.^13,20 The new senior lender went as far as what it called "a low leverage senior loan".¹ That loan was $31.3m. On our arithmetic it is $22.2m less than the 2019 loan's stated amount. The space between was filled by a $15.7m mezzanine loan and new equity from the owners.^1,2 No party has said why the senior loan was sized where it was. The timing fits the picture Wood described.

The hotel and its owners

The Westshore Grand, A Tribute Portfolio Hotel, stands at 4860 West Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa.^1,2 It has 325 keys, 14,321 sq ft of meeting and event space, a rooftop pool, a fitness centre and an attached parking garage. It was built in 1984.

A 2019 report places it in the Urban Centre mixed-use complex and lists a 5,046 sq ft ballroom and a Shula's Steakhouse.⁷ HEI Hotels and Resorts manages the hotel.⁹

The present name dates from November 2016. That month the hotel joined Marriott's Tribute Portfolio after a full renovation of its then 323 rooms, designed by Forchielli Glynn.¹¹ Marriott's release said it had been called The Paramount. The owners later added two guest rooms, which is how 323 became 325.⁷

Arden Group came first. In January 2015, through its fund Arden Real Estate Partners II, LP, it bought the 323-room InterContinental Hotel Tampa Westshore in the Urban Centre complex.¹⁰ That hotel had a Shula's Steakhouse and HEI as manager, and Arden planned a $7m renovation. The description matches The Westshore Grand, but no single source we found joins the two names.

Crescent Real Estate came second. On 13 February 2019 it said it had acquired majority ownership of the hotel, and put the renovation completed in 2016 at $6m.⁹ Its investment fund's 28 investments by then included the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa in Denver.

We found no public figures for the hotel's revenue, occupancy, RevPAR or profit. Without income or a valuation, neither the loan-to-value nor the debt yield can be worked out.

The financing

Commercial Observer reported the refinancing on 30 October 2023.¹ The total was $47m of debt in two loans.^1,2

• A $31.3m first-mortgage loan from Benefit Street Partners.
• A $15.7m mezzanine loan co-originated by Beach Point Capital Management and The LCP Group.

Both loans run for three years with two one-year extension options.¹ LCP says the money repaid the existing senior loan, paid closing costs, funded interest reserves and funded reserves for future capital improvements.² It also says the sponsor added new equity. The amount is not disclosed.

Newmark arranged the financing for the borrower, with a team led by Dustin Stolly, Jordan Roeschlaub and Nick Scribani.¹ We found no legal advisers for any party.

Michael Comparato, president of Franklin BSP Realty Trust, gave the senior lender's reason.¹ "This was a low leverage senior loan on a high quality asset in a market we believe is one of the top in the country." He added that Florida "continues to be a state that will benefit long-term from the migration patterns we have witnessed".

Franklin BSP Realty Trust, formerly Benefit Street Partners Realty Trust, is a listed commercial mortgage REIT. Its core portfolio ended 2023 at about $5.0bn.^1,5

The mezzanine lenders said less. Beach Point declined to comment, and neither LCP nor the owners returned requests.¹ LCP's project page makes its own case.² It cites Tampa's growth since the pandemic and an airport under two miles away that had regained its pre-pandemic traffic. Visit Tampa Bay's goal of $1bn a year in hotel-room revenue by 2025 had been reached in 2022.

LCP, based in White Plains, New York, describes itself as having nearly $1bn under management.¹⁵ It invests in hotels and net lease property and lends on hotel construction. Beach Point is a California credit manager. In May 2025 it closed nearly $1.3bn across two credit funds, including its first distinct real estate debt fund at $545m.¹⁶ How the $15.7m was split between the two is not public.

The structure

The senior loan is a first mortgage on the hotel. In the lender's later securitisation it is recorded as a "Whole Loan", not a participation, which is a share of a loan.⁴

How the mezzanine is secured is not stated in any source we found. Mezzanine on a property is usually secured by a pledge of the borrower's ownership interests, not by the building. Nothing public confirms that here.

The rate, margin, floor, fees and any rate cap on either loan are not public. Neither is the hotel's appraised value, so neither loan-to-value can be calculated.

The numbers

Everything in this section is our arithmetic on the reported figures.^1,2,6

• The senior loan is 66.6% of the new debt and the mezzanine 33.4%.
• Per key, the senior loan is about $96,300, the mezzanine about $48,300 and the total about $144,600.
• The 2019 loan was about $164,600 a key at its stated amount.
• The new senior loan alone covers 58.5% of the 2019 loan's stated amount.
• The new debt is $6.5m less than the 2019 loan's stated amount.

That $6.5m is not the owners' equity cheque. The balance still owed on the PCCP loan when it was repaid is not public. The new money also had to pay closing costs and fund the new reserves.² The equity could be larger or smaller than $6.5m, and we cannot say which.

With a three-year term from October 2023, both loans would first mature around October 2026. With both extensions, they would run to around October 2028. That is our arithmetic from the stated terms.¹

Why it worked

No party has explained the structure, so this section is our read.

Each lender took the risk it wanted. The senior lender took a first lien at a level it called low leverage, on a hotel it rated highly, in a state it expected to grow. Within a year it had funded that loan in the bond market through its own CLO.

The mezzanine lenders took the slice between the senior loan and the owners' equity, for a higher return. Their stated case rested on demand: airport traffic, hotel-room revenue and the city's growth.² They also had new equity from the owners beneath them, which is the first money lost if the hotel's value falls.

The owners kept the hotel, with less debt than the 2019 loan's stated amount. The price was new money and a second lender with its own claim.

What happened next: the senior loan became bonds

On 26 September 2024 BSPRT 2024-FL11 Issuer, LLC closed a commercial real estate CLO of about $1.024bn.³ The issuer is a consolidated subsidiary of Franklin BSP Realty Trust (NYSE: FBRT). It sold about $886m of notes privately.

Schedule A of its indenture lists "Westshore Grand $ 31,300,000 Whole Loan" among 21 collateral interests at closing.⁴ The loan was still at its full amount, so no paydown or extra funding is visible at that date.

The CLO's notes are all due 2039.³ Interest on them is set off one-month CME Term SOFR.⁴ The classes run from most senior to most junior:

On our sum the four classes outside the offering come to about $138.3m, or 13.5% of the CLO. A wholly owned FBRT subsidiary kept the issuer's preferred shares.³ So the hotel's first lien was cut into layers a second time. Bond investors funded the top of it, and on our reading the lender's group kept the bottom.

Other hotel loans share the pool, among them $28,511,765 of Brown Palace Hotel & HIE Downtown Denver, held as a participation.⁴ Crescent named the Brown Palace as one of its hotels in 2019, but no source says whether it is the borrower.⁹

FBRT had closed an $897m CLO, FL10, in 2023.^3,5 We think this funding is what lets a mortgage REIT keep making senior loans like this one.

We found no public report of a sale, default, modification or further financing of the hotel up to 4 November 2026. Booking sites still list it as The Westshore Grand, A Tribute Portfolio Hotel.²¹ On our arithmetic the first maturity fell around October 2026. Whether the extension options were used is not known.

What we do not know

• The rate, margin, floor, fees and any rate cap on either loan. The CLO's loan-level annex is not in the public filing, and its offering memorandum is private.⁴
• The hotel's appraised value, and so either loan-to-value. "Low leverage" is the only public description.
• The hotel's revenue, net operating income, occupancy, RevPAR and debt yield.
• How much new equity the owners put in, and the balance owed on the PCCP loan at repayment.
• How the mezzanine is secured, the intercreditor terms, and how the $15.7m was split between Beach Point and LCP.
• Which entity in the Benefit Street Partners group originated the senior loan. The president's comment and the securitisation point to the REIT.
• The exact closing date, the legal advisers and the terms of the 2019 PCCP loan.
• Whether the hotel Arden bought in 2015 and The Paramount of 2016 are the same building, though every description matches.
• Whether the extension options were used. We have not read the county's mortgage records or Florida's UCC filings, which could show the lenders and the mezzanine pledge.

What an owner can take from it

Hotel and property owners keep asking us the same question. Senior debt only goes so far. How is the rest of the stack built, and what does each layer cost? This deal answers the first half in public. The second needs other loans.

Why a refinancing needed a junior layer

A senior lender sizes its loan on the hotel's value and on how well its income covers interest at today's rates. When rates rise, the same income supports less debt. That is the pressure Wood described in 2022.¹⁴

Here the new senior loan covered 58.5% of the 2019 loan's stated amount, on our arithmetic. An owner in that position can pay the shortfall itself, sell, or buy a layer of capital between the senior loan and its equity. These owners bought the layer and added equity as well.

What each layer cost, from comparables

Neither loan's price is public. These are the nearest public prices: comparables, not this deal's terms.

Sources: FBRT for the senior spreads, FRED for SOFR, Sotherly Hotels and CoStar.^5,13,12,18

On these comparables the mezzanine costs at least 5.8 points a year more than floating senior debt. That is our arithmetic, from two different lenders' books.

As an illustration only, price this deal's split at those comparables. The senior loan at 9.2% and the mezzanine at 15% give a blended cost of debt a little over 11%. Interest would be about $5.2m a year, about $16,100 a key. That is our arithmetic on assumed rates, not what the Westshore Grand pays.

Mezzanine layers vary in size too. Driftwood's Carlos Rodriguez was reported to say that a senior loan typically takes the first 50% to 55% of the stack before Driftwood's mezzanine.¹⁹ On the Sheraton Dallas in 2025, Driftwood lent $35m of mezzanine behind a $300m senior loan.¹⁷ On our arithmetic that mezzanine is about 10.4% of the debt. At the Westshore Grand it is 33.4%.

What a mezzanine lender looks for

LCP chose to talk about demand: a growing city, rooms revenue and an airport close by.² The rest is our read of this deal.

A mezzanine lender wants a conservatively sized senior loan ahead of it, so the hotel can pay both. It wants new money from the owners beneath it. It wants its term to match the senior loan's, so it is never left behind a senior loan that falls due first. Here both loans have the same three years and the same two extensions.¹

Intercreditor basics

When a hotel carries senior and mezzanine debt, the two lenders sign an agreement with each other. As we understand such agreements, each sets who is paid first and what the mezzanine lender may do if the borrower stops paying. It usually also covers whether the mezzanine lender can cure a default or buy out the senior loan, and which changes to the senior loan need its consent. This deal's intercreditor terms are not public.

The senior loan here moved into a CLO within a year.⁴ An owner should expect the senior lender it negotiates with to be different from the one it deals with later.

Extension options

Both loans can run from around October 2026 to around October 2028, on our arithmetic, depending on the two options.¹ Whether they were used is not known.

We think an extension option is worth only its conditions. Options of this kind are usually subject to tests on the hotel's income, a fee or a new rate cap; the conditions here are not public. An owner should read them as closely as the rate, because they decide whether the third year is the last.

Cite as: “The Westshore Grand: how a Tampa hotel refinanced with a third of its debt in mezzanine”, Norvian Review, 5 November 2026.