C-PACE used to live at the edge of the capital stack. A niche tool for energy retrofits, small-ticket efficiency upgrades, and the occasional solar project. That era is over. The product has scaled past $10B in cumulative originations and is now financing ground-up multifamily, hotel construction, data centers, and recapitalizations of high-cost construction debt.
Real estate sponsors are now using it to fund up to 40% of new construction capitalization and, in many renovation cases, 100% of project costs. In recent years, C-PACE has grown from a sustainability bolt-on to a structural component of how the best deals get built.
The timing plays a major role in the rise of C-PACE. Senior debt is harder to source, mezzanine is more expensive than it has been in a decade, and equity is avoiding development deals. C-PACE fills a gap that nothing else in the stack fills cleanly: long-term, fixed-rate, non-recourse capital secured by a special assessment rather than a mortgage.
The sponsors who understand how it works, where it qualifies, and how to navigate senior lender consent are quietly winning deals that competitors cannot pencil. Developers who still think of C-PACE as a green-building product are missing the trade.
About the Workshop
On Monday, May 18 at 3:00PM ET, Thesis Driven is hosting a 90-minute live workshop on C-PACE with North Bridge Founder & CEO Laura Rapaport and Managing Director Ilana Ettinger. North Bridge is one of the most active C-PACE lenders in the country, and Laura and Ilana will walk through the mechanics of the product using real transactions from their own deal book.
The session is a practical breakdown of how C-PACE actually works, where it delivers the most value, and the deal-level considerations practitioners need to understand to underwrite it. It is built for sponsors, lenders, developers, investors, advisors, and capital markets brokers working across multifamily, single-family and build-to-rent, retail and mixed-use, industrial and logistics, hospitality and entertainment, data centers, and specialty assets like self-storage and senior living.
No prior C-PACE background required.
What the Session Covers
How C-PACE is structured and repaid, and why its position in the capital stack makes it attractive to sponsors and senior lenders alike
How sponsors are using C-PACE to reduce equity requirements, replace high-cost mezzanine, and improve project-level returns without taking on additional recourse
How the product adapts across ground-up development, post-TCO recapitalizations, and energy and resiliency retrofits, including why building to current code often unlocks eligibility automatically
How to navigate senior lender consent, what lenders are looking for, and how North Bridge approaches those conversations on its own deals
Format and Access
The live session runs 1.5 hours on Zoom. All registered participants receive an invitation to the Thesis Driven private Circle community, where session recordings and slides will be posted within one week of the workshop. Participants who cannot attend live will get the recording. Tickets are $199.
For anyone underwriting a deal where the equity is light, the debt is expensive, or the project sits at the intersection of new construction and energy code, this session pays for itself the first time a sponsor pencils a C-PACE tranche that would otherwise be filled with mezzanine.
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
