Commercial Real Estate & Property

Tenants sign leases that assume the lights stay on. A Class A office tower with no standby power is a liability in a grid event. A multifamily property manager who watches elevators lock out and hallway lighting fail during a summer storm gets a call from every tenant in the building by morning. Grocery-anchored retail centers stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars of perishable inventory in the first few hours of an extended outage. The generator is not a luxury specification anymore, it is a lease-defensible feature and in some cases a code requirement.

We finance standby and emergency generators for commercial real estate owners, property managers, developers, and REITs, starting at $50k and covering the full range from a 100 kW standby for a mid-size office building to a multi-megawatt paralleling installation for a large mixed-use development. New and used equipment qualify. B and C credit is considered. Most deals fund within one to two weeks off a straightforward application plus recent generator-file bank records.

The practical challenge for real estate operators is that generator capital usually competes with renovation, leasing, and debt-service priorities all at once. Financing the generator separately, rather than funding it from property operating reserves or an equity line, keeps other capital working. A monthly payment structured against the useful life of the equipment is often the right answer for a stabilized property with predictable NOI.

Tenant expectations have shifted. Enterprise and professional-services tenants who experienced grid events during recent storm seasons now include backup power in their site-selection checklists. Brokers representing national tenants report that properties without documented standby coverage are losing RFP consideration to competing buildings that can demonstrate N+1 power redundancy. For owners competing in the leasing market, adding standby generation is increasingly a retention and vacancy-reduction investment, not merely a risk-management cost.

Building codes in hurricane-prone markets, particularly Florida, the Gulf Coast, and portions of the Mid-Atlantic, have tightened post-storm requirements for high-rise residential and mixed-use properties. Some jurisdictions now require automatic standby power for elevators, emergency lighting, and fire-pump systems in buildings above a certain height threshold, regardless of whether tenants are demanding it. Code compliance drives a portion of generator demand that is essentially inelastic to property performance.

Data-center-adjacent commercial development in corridors like Northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Dallas has raised the standard for power infrastructure in nearby office and flex-industrial properties as well, because tenants in those markets have high expectations set by the hyperscale environment around them. Data center operators set a bar that commercial real estate in the same geography now has to meet.

Office and medical-office buildings typically protect life-safety loads (emergency lighting, fire pumps, elevators) plus tenant-negotiated critical loads on standby. A 10-story Class B office building might require a 300 kW to 600 kW standby diesel generator with an automatic transfer switch and sub-base fuel storage for extended run capability. Code-minimum protection costs less than full building coverage, and many owners start there and expand.

Multifamily residential, particularly high-rise and mid-rise, requires elevator, common-area lighting, and fire-pump standby at minimum under NFPA 101 Life Safety Code. Some owners extend coverage to domestic water pumps and lobby HVAC. The generator size depends on the building's emergency load schedule, which the electrical contractor develops during design.

Industrial and flex-space parks have a different profile. Individual tenant loads can be large (manufacturing equipment, refrigeration, server rooms), but the standby requirement is often tenant-specific rather than whole-building. Landlords in industrial parks sometimes install pad-mounted utility transformer feeders with main standby coverage and let tenants specify their own critical-load protection within the unit. We can finance whole-park infrastructure generators or individual building standby units depending on the ownership structure.

We finance Generac commercial standby units through large industrial-scale diesels from major OEMs. The brand and model depend on the load requirement and the contractor's spec. We are agnostic on OEM and structure the deal around the equipment you actually purchase, not around a preferred vendor relationship.

Commercial real estate financing has entity-structure complexity that equipment finance usually does not. The property may be owned by an LLC or LP with a thin operating history, the principals may have strong personal credit or may be leveraged across multiple properties, and the income picture may sit at the property level rather than at the entity level. We work through these structures.

For stabilized properties with income, three months of bank statements from the operating entity tell us enough for most transactions. The generator is collateral in addition to whatever real estate the property represents, which strengthens the overall credit picture. For development or pre-stabilization properties, we may look at personal guarantees or the developer entity's track record across prior projects.

Equipment loans are the most common structure for real estate owners who intend to hold the generator as a building fixture. The equipment is depreciated alongside other capital improvements to the property. Section 179 deductions apply to standby generators placed in service for a business property, and the immediate expensing treatment in the year of purchase is worth modeling against the cost of financing. Your CPA should run that number, but it often makes a financed acquisition more attractive than one funded from reserves.

For property managers who control multiple buildings, we can structure multi-property transactions that cover several generators across a portfolio in a single closing. That approach reduces administrative overhead and may improve advance rates by presenting a larger, diversified collateral pool.

Tell us the property type, the approximate kW load requirement, and whether you have an equipment quote or are still speccing. We work from the equipment side and the credit side simultaneously to get you to a term sheet within 24 hours. Funding paced to the completed file. $50k minimum. B/C credit welcome.

Apply online or call. Tenant calls about the lights stop when the generator is in.