Barings has stepped in with $250 million in permanent financing for Seattle’s newly completed Museum House, the twin-tower First Hill community built beside the Frye Art Museum, a deal that closes the loop on a project a decade in the making and signals continued institutional lender appetite for trophy multifamily assets even as citywide per-unit pricing slides.
Cushman & Wakefield has arranged a $250 million refinancing for Museum House, the twin-tower, 506-unit First Hill development that took roughly a decade to reach completion, in a deal that lands the newly stabilized property a permanent loan larger than the construction financing that built it.
The brokerage’s Equity, Debt & Structured Finance team of Dave Karson, Christopher Moyer, Alex Lapidus and Meredith Crawford represented the sponsor, a pension fund, in securing the loan from Barings, according to a news release about the deal. The refinancing replaces the roughly $245 million construction loan Westbank, the project’s original developer, secured from a national life insurance company in 2023 to complete the building, meaning the new permanent debt essentially matches the capital it took to build the tower, evidence that Museum House has stabilized close to its underwritten value despite a Seattle multifamily investment market where per-unit pricing has fallen sharply over the past year.
“This is one of the most architecturally significant buildings in Seattle and the First Hill neighborhood is developing nicely as a residential community just outside the downtown,” Dave Karson, executive vice chair at Cushman & Wakefield, said in the news release. “There were many lenders who recognized the benefit of scale and the borrower received some exceptional bids for this refinance. It’s a great sign for the market and for large institutional quality property.”
“We are pleased to provide the refinancing for Museum House, a differentiated multifamily asset within the market,” JB Gerber, Managing Director with Barings, said in the announcement. “Backed by strong sponsorship and resilient market fundamentals, the property represents the type of lending opportunity we seek to support.”
At 707 Terry Ave., Museum House opened to renters in March 2025, roughly ten years after Westbank and the Frye Art Museum first unveiled the twin-tower plan for the museum’s former parking lot. Designed by Perkins&Will under architect Peter Busby, the project consists of two 33-story residential towers connected by a glass-enclosed skybridge roughly 300 feet above the street, with sliding aluminum screens wrapping both towers whose perforations are drawn from artworks in the Frye’s permanent collection. The building holds 506 studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom units, 404 at market rate and 102 income-restricted through Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption program, plus 6,010 square feet of ground-floor retail. Amenities include a rooftop pool and hot tub, an indoor and outdoor fitness center, coworking space, resident lounges, a shared kitchen, pet amenities and sustainability features such as water-efficient fixtures, high-efficiency mechanical systems, drought-tolerant landscaping and solar shading.
Museum House’s roughly 20 percent affordable set-aside was structured under an earlier version of Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption program; the city overhauled the incentive in November 2025 with the launch of MFTE Program 7, which extends a building’s property-tax exemption period to as long as 24 years, up from 12, raises eligible tenant incomes to as high as 90 percent of area median income, and replaces the prior flat 4.5 percent annual cap on rent-limit increases with a formula tied to the city’s published rent-limit adjustments, capped at 10 percent. The changes are aimed at drawing more developments like Museum House into the program at a moment when Seattle’s overall multifamily supply pipeline has thinned considerably.
That thinning pipeline is part of what is underpinning lender appetite for an asset like Museum House. Seattle multifamily vacancy fell to 6.7 percent in the second quarter of 2026, down from 7.0 percent a year earlier, while average asking rents rose slightly to $2,048 per unit, according to Kidder Mathews’ Seattle Multifamily Market Report. Construction deliveries, however, plunged 53.15 percent year-over-year to 3,813 units through the first half of 2026, even as net absorption of 6,085 units continued to outpace that reduced new supply. On the investment side, the average multifamily sales price fell 14.75 percent year-over-year to $276,610 per unit as the average cap rate ticked up to 5.7 percent from 5.6 percent, Kidder Mathews reported, a pricing pullback that stands in contrast to the debt market’s evident willingness to lend a nine-figure sum against a single, newly delivered asset. Museum House’s $250 million loan works out to roughly $494,000 per unit on a financing basis, underscoring how selectively that lender appetite is being deployed toward trophy-quality, well-located product even as broader per-unit valuations soften.
The refinancing also arrives against a wider debt market still working through a heavy maturity wall, with roughly $875 billion in commercial real estate loans scheduled to come due in 2026 nationally and refinancing coupons on conduit CMBS loans running between 6.00 percent and 6.50 percent, according to industry loan-pricing data; life-company and agency multifamily debt has priced more favorably, in the 5.50 percent to 6.25 percent range, a tier of the market where institutional lenders such as Barings have continued to compete for scale transactions backed by experienced sponsors. For First Hill, a neighborhood anchored by the Frye Art Museum, Seattle University, Swedish Medical Center and other regional healthcare institutions, Museum House’s financing is also a marker of the submarket’s maturation: a mixed-income tower built on land tied to a nonprofit museum, financed first by a life insurer’s construction loan and now by a pension-fund-owned permanent loan from a global asset manager.
