A joint venture between Great Point Studios and National Resources has secured financing for one of its Yonkers film studio projects.
Wednesday, First Citizens Bank Announce A unit of the company provided a $42.2 million loan to the joint venture for the 1050 North Broadway development. The entertainment production facility is expected to occupy 112,000 square feet, including office, warehouse and factory space.
With financing, the venture ticked off a big box on the development project’s to-do list. The space is fully pre-leased to Spanish-language production company MediaPro US.
The boom in filmmaking in Yonkers, especially at Great Point and National Resources, stems from the rise of streaming services and New York state’s famously generous film-making tax credit, which politicians recently expanded to include fears of some watchdog groups).
Late last year, national resource entity iPark purchased the 28-acre campus at 463 Hawthorne Avenue from the nonprofit Rising Ground for $52.6 million, where it plans to build production facilities.
Twice the size of the North Broadway Center, the campus spans 265,000 square feet and includes 25 buildings, a baseball field, an indoor basketball court, and indoor and outdoor swimming pools. There are also 2 million square feet of development rights.
These locations are approximately 20 minutes’ drive apart.
The two development firms are also collaborating in Yonkers on the $100 million Lionsgate Studios, a 108,000-square-foot facility powering a wave of production spaces in the Westchester County city. The joint venture secured a $40 million construction loan from CIT Bank, the same division of First Citizens that provided the latest Yonkers production development loan.
First Citizens recently stopped making general office loans because they were tired of the looming losses on Class B office debt. In March, the Charlotte-based bank agreed to buy the assets and liabilities of Silicon Valley Bank, taking on $72 billion in loans and $56 billion in assets.
