Smith, Gambrell & Russell lawyers are working on a military housing joint venture slated to be valued at $14 million when it is completed.

Partner Malcolm D. “Mac” Young and associates Jonathan M. Gallant and Eugene D. Bryant represented Atlanta-based Place Properties in a joint venture to capitalize Place's military housing division, Place Base Housing. Gallant said that Place's partner in the joint venture, which has requested anonymity, provided all the funding for the projects.

“We have acquired, built and are operating a number of projects, and are on schedule to develop in the future,” Gallant said. He explained that the current transaction, valued at about $7 million, involves housing projects at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart, both in Georgia; and at Fort Hood in Texas.

The joint venture partners plan to roll in three additional projects in the next year or so, Gallant said, and contemporaneously are working on other new projects involving land they are pursuing, or land they own but have not yet begun to develop.

Gallant said the joint venture purchases land, then designs apartment complexes geared specifically toward military personnel—with units designed for families, many of which are fully furnished, and with long-term parking for service members who are shipped overseas and need a place to store their vehicles.

Then, he said, Place Properties either leases the units directly to military personnel—who can rent apartments over the Internet from wherever they are in the world—or to contractors who lease them to service members.

In mid-December, Young and Gallant also represented Place and another partner, Blue Vista Capital Management, in the acquisition of $33.7 million in construction financing for a student housing project in downtown Chicago. The joint venture has $24.3 million in equity in the project, which is valued at $58 million, Gallant said. Part of that equity, he said, comes from a tax credit granted because Place and Blue Vista are refurbishing a historic building.

The lender, Gallant said, is US Bank, which was represented by Chicago law firm Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg.