A 3,000-acre development under construction in North Florida with a lagoon and beach got a $58 million boost — with help from Walker & Dunlop.

Beachwalk is a master-planned community that will have homes, offices and retail along County Road 210 from Interstate 95 east to U.S. 1 in St. Johns County.

The site is at least 7.5 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, yet the project includes a 14-acre lagoon with 1,000 feet of beachfront.

How's that possible? The lagoon and beach were artificially built by Crystal Lagoons, which used its patented filtration system for this and other lagoons worldwide.

Encore Capital Management, a Boca Raton-based company co-founded by managing principal Art Falcone, and Twin Creeks Development Associates LLC, a Delray Beach-based company led by John Kinsey, have partnered to develop Beachwalk.

Falcone is one of the partners developing Miami Worldcenter, the nine-block, 30-acre mixed-use downtown project.

Walker & Dunlop capital markets group managing directors Kevin O'Grady, Daniel Sheehan and Eric McGlynn, all in Miami, worked on behalf of Falcone to secure the construction financing for two segments of Beachwalk.

The bulk of the funding —$51.6 million — is going to Beachwalk Apartments, a 348-unit garden-style rental community with 11 three-story buildings on 21.5 acres. A total of $34.75 million was secured by Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based BB&T, and $16.85 million came from Vestavia, Alabama-based equity partner Equity Resources LLC, a real estate investment company that focuses on multifamily.

The remaining $6.5 million is for Atlantica Isles, which will have 166 villas and 119 single-family homes for sale. Bank of the Ozarks Inc., based in Arkansas, provided the loan.

Generally, the residential deals were well-received by lenders even though the Jacksonville-area market has a reputation for being “spotty,” Walker & Dunlop's O'Grady said.

But a closer look at the deals shows the difference between financing multifamily and financing other residential offerings in the current market.

Beachwalk Apartments drew about 10 interested lenders and 14 interested equity partners. Atlantica Isles drew about four bidders, a good reception but not the usual 10 bidders O'Grady is accustomed to seeing for such loans, he said.

The difference might be a result of changing market conditions. For one, multifamily has been strengthening with growing demand from renters and investors. At the same time, the steady development stream of apartment high-rises in urban areas has made lenders more cautious about financing these projects, although this applies only to some parts of the country, O'Grady said.

He noted lenders have been turning to garden-style rental communities like Beachwalk Apartments.

“We finance a lot of high-rise apartment buildings nationwide. We have had a hard time getting financing for them, but we have seen the underwriting and the scrutiny on the underwriting become tighter, a lot tighter,” O'Grady said. “We knew this going into the year that there was going to be more challenges on the urban stuff than there was going to be on the suburban stuff.”

Developing a garden-style community is faster and easier compared with a high-rise multifamily building, further whetting lenders' appetite for suburban products over urban ones, O'Grady added.

“It's a heck of a lot different building a 25- to 40-story apartment building than it is a two-story garden-style apartment building with all of the bells and whistles and amenities that you put on a horizontal level versus one building going up vertically,” O'Grady said. It's “a lot easier for lenders to get their arms around it, and there's a lot more lenders in that space.”

Residential financing has shifted in response to the 2007-2008 real estate market crash, a lot of the blame for which was put on home mortgage lending. Since then, lenders have shifted to corporate financing, giving loans to the homebuilding divisions of big-name builders, O'Grady said.

Americrest Luxury Homes LLC is developing Atlantica Isles, he said. Even though it was started by developers, including Falcone, with years of experience, the limited liability company itself doesn't have a track record.

“Even though it's staffed with people who have been with him (Falcone) for 15 years, it's basically a new entity. It doesn't have a history of building. The guys in it have built 100,000-plus homes, but this new entity hasn't. So attracting a facility type of a lender to that, there just wasn't enough track record or history with that new entity even though the individuals standing behind it have all that,” O'Grady said.

Aside from Falcone, Americrest was founded by Albo Antenucci Jr., an executive with the Boca Raton-based Falcone Group LLC, and Neil Eisner, a member of the acquisitions and asset management team at Falcone's Encore Capital Management.

More homes are planned at Beachwalk as well as 825,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, 360,000 square feet of office space and 1.5 million square feet of industrial space, according to a Walker & Dunlop news release.

Others developers in the community are Miami-based homebuilder Lennar Corp. and Jacksonville-based Dream Finders Homes.

The three-year Beachwalk Apartments loan offers an additional four-year, mini-perm option and covered 65 percent of the construction cost. The 18-month Atlantica Isles loan offers two one-year extensions and covered 75 percent of construction.

Walker & Dunlop didn't disclose the interest rates, saying only they have a competitive floating rate spread.

The Beackwalk Apartments deal closed May 30, and the Atlantica deal closed May 22.