LEAP RFP - Joel Lilly Response Items

JL items

Drafted

Partial

Need input

What I need from you

Seven answers unlock everything else

Three dates per project — planning start, land acquisition, construction completion. NetSuite cannot produce these; every date it holds is the 2022 conversion boundary. Austin may already have them from Knoxville.
Jeffrey Park total development cost and its hard / soft / fee split. Your Knoxville figure was $300M and it came from you, not the system. Only Josi or Eric Casto can build the split.
Equity amount and source per project. Debt is pulled and confirmed below; equity is not something I should infer.
Whether to name lenders in a public submission. We deliberately did not name them for Knoxville. IEDC is also a public body.
Which two credit references — and their mailing addresses, which the RFP requires and we do not currently hold.
Key decisions and sell/buy points per phase for item 71. Judgment, not data.
Bob's confirmation on the audited statements question and whether a proof-of-funds letter is coming.

Comparable project cost — the spine of items 64, 65 and 76

Cost category	Quarry Trails	Grandview Crossing	Jeffrey Park
Land	$70.0M	$29.8M	not available
Horizontal / site	$45.2M	$27.6M	not available
Vertical hard	$232.5M	$183.8M	not available
Soft	$63.5M	$50.2M	not available
Development fees	$11.3M	$7.5M	not available
Total development cost	$422.6M gross	$299.0M built	$300M (your figure)

Basis notes. Quarry Trails is $422.6M including the Marble Cliff Canyon site entity, $378.6M net of the $44.0M intercompany elimination, and $364.1M excluding the site entity — that last basis is the one behind the $354.7M we gave Knoxville on August 6, so the program has grown $9.4M since. Grandview Crossing Phase 2 adds $226.4M planned, taking it to roughly $525M all in. Jeffrey Park cannot be split from NetSuite: Iron Works, Legacy, Foundry and the garage return no rows at all because they predate the 2022 QuickBooks conversion.

The eleven items

Item 41

Identify financial partners, prospective lenders and equity investors

Partial

"Should identify" — scored under 5.2.2, including experience financing large-scale projects of similar size and scope.

Draft response

Across the three comparable communities Thrive currently carries $711.8M of project debt with eighteen separate capital providers, split $649.3M of institutional debt and $62.5M of seller and installment financing.

Quarry Trails ($232.0M): Lument Structured Finance, SM Finance III, Simmons Bank (senior and mezzanine), Pathways, Kish Bank, Mutual Federal, Heartland Bank, Ohio State Bank, Riverside Bank.
Grandview Crossing ($287.6M): ACRES, SM Finance III, KeyBank, First Commonwealth Bank, Cuyahoga River Capital, Kish Bank.
Jeffrey Park ($192.2M): Wright-Patt Credit Union, LCNB, S&T Bank, plus additional institutional lenders on the Sage, Legacy and Foundry phases.

The point to make is the depth of the bench, not any single relationship: no one lender carries more than roughly 10% of the portfolio, and the group spans balance-sheet banks, credit unions, debt funds and structured-finance shops.

Need from you:

Whether to name the lenders at all. We deliberately did not for the Knoxville public submission, and IEDC is a public body too. Naming them is stronger if you are comfortable with it.
Who the LEAP equity partner will be. The RFP asks for prospective equity investors by name and the answer is currently blank.
Three phases carry lenders that post to a generic "Bank Other" account, so their names need confirming with Josi before they appear in print.

Item 64

Development costs by comparable project, split hard / soft / fees including horizontal

Drafted

"Should provide, at a minimum." Katie's note: horizontal cost is called out specifically, which matters given the unfunded utilities question on this site.

Draft response

Use the table above verbatim. The horizontal line is the one that answers IEDC's own concern, so lead with it rather than burying it: Thrive has self-funded $72.8M of horizontal and site work across Quarry Trails and Grandview Crossing — 10.7% and 9.2% of total project cost respectively — on two sites that each required full infrastructure before a single vertical dollar was spent.

Quarry Trails is the closer analogue: a former active quarry requiring brownfield remediation, new public roads, and utility extension, delivered alongside a 220-acre Metro Park.

Need from you: the Jeffrey Park split, which only Josi or Casto can build. Everything else on this item is ready.

Item 65

Development financing — debt, equity, sources, incentives and subsidies

Partial

"Should provide, at a minimum." Katie's note: incentives and subsidies are named. Relevant to a publicly sponsored district.

Draft response — debt (confirmed)

Quarry Trails $232.0M — $176.1M institutional, $56.0M seller and installment.
Grandview Crossing $287.6M — $259.9M institutional, $27.7M seller and installment.
Jeffrey Park $192.2M — $185.7M institutional, $6.5M seller and installment.

Draft response — incentives and subsidies

Quarry Trails: Marble Cliff Quarry Community Authority (a new community authority levying a community development charge), Ohio brownfield remediation funding, port authority conduit financing, tax increment financing, and a land partnership with Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks.

Grandview Crossing: Community Reinvestment Area abatement, tax increment financing, and an Ohio Transformational Mixed-Use Development tax credit award, delivered in partnership with the City of Grandview Heights.

Jeffrey Park: the Jeffrey Park New Community Authority, tax increment financing, and brownfield remediation on the former Jeffrey Manufacturing site.

The framing that matters for LEAP: every one of these was structured with a public partner, and in each case Thrive carried the development risk while the public tool funded infrastructure the project could not otherwise support.

Need from you:

Equity amount and source per project. Bob or Josi.
Eric Casto to confirm the incentive list above is complete and correctly named before it goes in.

Item 66

Project timeline — initial planning, land acquisition, construction completion

Need input

"Should provide, at a minimum." Katie's note: three milestones, not one duration.

Nothing drafted, deliberately. NetSuite cannot answer this. Every first-activity date it holds — land, horizontal and vertical alike — returns 12/31/2021 for Quarry Trails and Grandview Crossing and 12/2022 for Jeffrey Park. That is the QuickBooks to NetSuite conversion boundary, not a project milestone. Putting those dates in front of IEDC would be visibly wrong on projects that have been under way far longer.

Planning start, land acquisition and construction completion for each of the three. Austin likely assembled these for the Knoxville sections already.

Item 71

Phasing financials — key decisions, sell/buy points, average home prices

Partial

"Should provide, at a minimum." Katie's note: average home prices apply to the for-sale components specifically.

Draft response — average home prices (confirmed, Quarry Trails)

Townhomes and flats: 47 of 100 units closed for $28.9M, averaging $615,100 and $412 per square foot. Pricing has moved from $399 to $436 per foot on flats and $384 to $403 on townhomes between 2022 and 2026.

Single family: 61 of 176 homes closed, lifetime average $971,773 at $328 per foot; the 2026 vintage averages $1,059,120 at $370 per foot.

2026 is the record year for the for-sale program at 14 condominium closings, 3.5 times the 2025 total — a useful data point on absorption in a phased build-out.

Need from you:

Jeffrey Park for-sale averages. I can pull these from Smartsheet if the for-sale phases are tracked there — say the word.
Key decisions and sell/buy points per phase. That is judgment and it should be yours, not reconstructed from the ledger.

Item 72

Demonstrate the financial capacity to finance and develop the Project

Need input

Pass/Fail under 5.2.1. Katie flags the tension: the lead-in says Proposers "may provide," the first bullet says the Proposer "shall submit." Treat as required.

Draft framing

The honest position is that Thrive does not own the assets, so operating-company audited statements understate capacity. The stronger evidence is the delivered portfolio: more than $1.1 billion of development delivered or under way across five communities, currently supported by $711.8M of project debt across eighteen capital providers, every dollar of it raised project by project.

Need from you and Bob:

Three years of CPA-audited statements with contingent liabilities is the pass/fail gate. Confirm they exist in the form IEDC wants.
Bob's read on whether operating-company statements are the right evidence or whether we propose a supplement, which the "may provide" language leaves room for.
Whether a proof-of-funds or equity commitment letter is achievable before September 4.

Item 75

Evidence of capability to raise debt and equity in the current market

Partial

Shall / may provide. Katie's note: current market conditions, not historical capability. A lender or equity letter is the most direct evidence.

Draft response

Point at closings inside the last twelve months rather than the portfolio as a whole. Candidates from the ledger: the Simmons Bank senior and mezzanine facilities on Quarry Trails Phase III, the Kish Bank facility on the Quarry Trails townhomes and flats with a second-phase term sheet executed in August 2026, and the WestBend construction package now closing.

Need from you and Bob: which recent closings you want cited, and whether a current lender letter can be obtained. This item is far stronger with one.

Item 76

Evidence of experience financing recent comparable transactions

Drafted

Shall / may provide. Katie's note: overlaps with the comparable-project financing fields in 5.2.5 — cross-reference rather than duplicating pages, since page limits are tight.

Draft response

Do not re-state the numbers here. Cross-reference item 65 and add one line: the three comparable communities were financed across eighteen capital providers spanning construction, bridge, permanent, mezzanine and seller paper, alongside four separate public credit-enhancement structures — new community authorities, tax increment financing, port authority conduit issuance and state tax credits.

Watch the page budget. Only the cover page, table of contents, dividers, Financial Capacity and Execution of Offer sit outside the 50-page limit. Key personnel resumes and the three-page-per-member backgrounds do not.

Item 77

Two commercial or institutional credit references, with addresses

Need input

Shall / may provide. Katie's note: addresses are required, not just names and contacts.

Candidates already on file

Two of the five references used for the Knoxville RFQ are institutional credit relationships and would qualify directly:

Bill Kuhar, Senior Vice President, First Commonwealth Bank — WKuhar@fcbanking.com, 330-242-0153. Lender on Grandview Crossing, currently $58.5M across two facilities.
Chad Kiner, Senior Vice President, BWE — chad.kiner@bwe.com, 614-204-7879. Jeffrey Park relationship.

Other candidates with live exposure: Simmons Bank, KeyBank, Lument, Kish Bank, Wright-Patt.

Need from you:

Which two.
Mailing addresses. The RFP requires them and we hold email and phone only. One call each.

Item 78

Authorization letter permitting each credit reference to respond to IEDC

Need input

Shall / may provide. Katie's note: a separate deliverable from the reference itself, and the item most commonly missed. One letter per reference.

Blocked only on item 77. Pick the two references and I will draft both letters the same day — they are short, formulaic, and go out over an authorized officer's signature. Flagging it here because it is the single easiest item to lose points on and it is currently Not Started.

One correction worth carrying forward

The NetSuite cost query we have been reusing computes SUM of debits minus SUM of credits, which returns null for any account that only ever carries debits. At whole-entity level it nets out correctly, which is why the totals given to Knoxville stand unchanged. At account level it silently drops entire accounts — the first pass of the table above had Quarry Trails vertical hard at $184M against a true $232.5M. Corrected and re-run. Anything built off that recipe below entity level should be re-checked.