A 105-unit apartment and retail building is coming to Seattle's Fremont Village neighborhood after its developer landed a $32.7 million senior construction loan, with construction slated to begin this summer and completion expected in late 2027 or early 2028. The project, called 1 Fremont, will rise as a mixed-use building with residential units above ground-floor retail space in a neighborhood already dense with tech employment.
The loan was jointly provided by Strathcona Capital and Belay Investment Group, according to a Bisnow report on the financing. Seattle-based Cohen Properties, LLC is the borrower behind the project, and the two lending firms recently announced a broader strategic partnership to form a programmatic joint venture targeting construction and bridge financing opportunities across the country, per the same report.
Kevin Ryan, managing partner at Strathcona Capital, said the pairing reflects that focus: Strathcona and Belay will invest in high-quality bridge and construction credit investments across the U.S., primarily concentrating on multifamily assets. Strathcona Capital, founded in 2021, is a real estate finance company built around origination, asset management and servicing of U.S. real estate credit, and its leadership has deployed more than $7 billion of real estate debt nationally, the report notes. The firm targets fixed-rate and floating-rate real estate loans of all sizes and property types.
Why Belay Sees Fremont Village as a Strong Bet
Eliza Bailey, co-founder, CEO and CIO of Belay Investment Group, said Belay considers the 1 Fremont loan a strong first investment because the planned multifamily product will meet growing demand in a desirable Seattle submarket. Belay Investment Group is described as an institutional real estate investment management firm that provides scalable access to small-scale real estate, and the firm pursues debt and equity investment opportunities across risk spectra, property types and geographies, forming programmatic partnerships with locally entrenched and specialized operators around the country.
That confidence is rooted in Fremont Village's employment base. The area includes arts, entertainment and technology employment hubs, with Google, Adobe, and Salesforce all cited as major employers nearby. The building itself will offer high-quality residential housing aimed at Seattle's growing professional workforce.
A Sister Project With a Proven Track Record Next Door
Cohen Properties isn't new to this stretch of Fremont Avenue. The firm formed a 10-year strategic partnership with Bellevue-based AGM Real Estate Group in March 2025 to pursue mid-sized mixed-use developments across Seattle, with 1 Fremont designated as that partnership's inaugural project, according to AGM Real Estate Group. Under that arrangement, AGM handles asset management and property operations while Cohen Properties leads site selection and ground-up development.
AGM notes that 1 Fremont was designed as a sister development to Cohen Properties' 93-unit Fremont Village Apartments directly across the street, which was completed in early 2024 and reached full occupancy with rents outperforming initial projections. Cohen Properties also completed a 101-unit building at 4316 Fremont Ave. N. in late 2023, having broken ground there in late summer 2020, according to the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. That earlier project was built with STS Construction Services and is part of an ongoing wave of mid-rise density additions along the corridor.
Building Specs and City Fees
Design specifications for the five-story building, per the Daily Journal of Commerce, call for 4,365 square feet of ground-floor retail space spread across four or five commercial bays, an 860-square-foot rooftop deck, 36 subterranean vehicle parking stalls, and 115 resident bicycle stalls. Architecture firm Atelier Drome divided the street frontage into a four-box scheme intended to match the neighborhood's commercial character.
The project also carries a Mandatory Housing Affordability payment calculated at $927,645, a city-mandated fee developers pay in exchange for increased building density under Seattle's MHA policy, which requires commercial and residential developers to either build affordable units on-site or contribute cash to the city's housing fund. Seattle's MHA framework enacted upzones across the Fremont urban village, including Neighborhood Commercial zones with 55-foot and 75-foot height limits, expanding residential capacity along transit and commercial corridors, according to the City of Seattle.
Financing Comes as Regional Construction Pipeline Shrinks
The loan lands at a moment when new apartment construction across the region has slowed considerably. Multifamily project completions across the Seattle quad-county area fell from an all-time high of 10,266 units in 2022 to 6,416 in 2023 and just 2,294 in early 2024, shrinking the active construction pipeline to 28,629 units, according to Kidder Mathews. High interest rates and elevated construction costs forced many permitted Seattle projects to pause.
Even so, national lending activity has picked back up. U.S. multifamily construction starts rose 27.4% year-over-year in July 2025 as elevated homeownership costs kept would-be buyers in the rental market, even as nationwide project completions dropped 28% from peak levels, per a market analysis from CoFi Lending. Shrinking delivery pipelines have strengthened rental market fundamentals and rent growth expectations for upcoming deliveries, the analysis notes.
Public dollars are moving in parallel with private capital. The Seattle Office of Housing committed $155 million in January 2026 to fund the creation of 439 new affordable rental units and preserve 1,677 existing rentals across 20 citywide projects, with major allocations targeting Beacon Hill, the Chinatown-International District, and the University District, according to the Daily Journal of Commerce.
Cohen Properties' Growing Footprint
1 Fremont is one piece of a broader expansion for Cohen Properties around Seattle. In June, the firm partnered with former Seattle Seahawks player Cliff Avril's CA Family Properties, operating as C&A Development, to break ground on a 67-unit affordable project on Capitol Hill backed by Amazon's Housing Equity Fund, as Hoodline previously reported. That project, income-restricted and built on a 99-year affordability structure, sits alongside a separate 170-unit mixed-use approval Hoodline covered in May for a Fremont development along the Stone Way corridor.
Together, the projects illustrate a pattern: debt funds and institutional lenders are increasingly selective about where they put construction capital, favoring sponsors with demonstrated lease-up success in dense, walkable urban submarkets. Cohen Properties' back-to-back completions across Fremont Avenue N. have apparently made the case for lenders willing to bet $32.7 million on a fourth project in the same few blocks.
