The bank is also finishing work on a multi-million-dollar project to expand a Philadelphia-area nonprofit's New Jersey facilities.



"Harleysville was a great community bank. But it couldn't have done the AAA transaction," Robert Kane, the ex-PNC Bank officer who heads First Niagara's Philadelphia region, told me. "That property had sat there. There had been plans to make it a hotel, to make it condos," back in the mid-2000s real estate bubble. More recently, "Philadelphia's apartment business has expanded, it's a great location." So Kane's team took the proposal by Caplan's Philadelphia Management Corp. to his company's real estate syndication group, which brought in TD Bank as a supporting lender and financed the deal.