Ground Leases for 1-4 Unit Buildings

[John Franczyk]

I went to a presentation by Safehold, a publicly-traded REIT that buys the land under big commercial developments and then leases that land back to the building owners with complex ground leases. Safehold's sweet spot is in the range of $30 to $100 million per project. Their sample pitch is that they can buy the land under a $100 million development, say, for $35 million, which reduces the building owner's financing obligations to $65 million. Safehold then gets regular rent payments along with a first priority lien on the property and buildings. The actual structure of the deals is much more complex like this, but this is the general picture.

I'm curious if this kind of structure might work on a much smaller scale for 1-4 unit rentals in the price range of $100K to $200K. I'm playing around with some numbers to see if it makes sense, but I haven't come to any conclusions yet. Has anyone seen a financing structure like this?  Does anyone have a sample ground lease I could look at?