San Francisco-based solar developer Renewable Properties paused its corporate capital raise process earlier this year due to broader market uncertainty, the firm’s president told Infralogic.

The company launched the process to raise USD 200m to USD 300m in February, with KeyBanc Capital Markets acting as financial advisor. First-round bids were collected around early May, with the process halted shortly thereafter.

Bids were submitted amidst a sea of uncertainty following the announcement of April’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, as Congress was working through what would eventually become the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). As a result, fewer bids than expected were submitted, and the bids that did come in were not workable, Renewable Properties founder and President Aaron Halimi said.

“It was kind of a sign of the times in terms of the timing around that, and that led us to decide to pause the process,” he explained. “We saw the market deteriorate dramatically within a month of Liberation Day. And as we all know, the capital markets really froze across the board. That led to not as many people being able to participate, and then those that did participate not being able to put forth anything that was quite frankly workable, credible, or made any financial sense.”

Monitoring the market

Renewable Properties, which focuses on small utility-scale and distributed solar projects as well as storage and electric vehicle charging, plans to relaunch the process with KeyBanc continuing as financial advisor, but the timing is still unclear. The process could relaunch in the next few months, or the next twelve months.

“We are now, on the heels of the [start of construction] guidance, going to be monitoring the market and waiting for the right time to relaunch,” Halimi said. “We want to make sure investor confidence is there.”

With the OBBB now signed into law and last week’s US Treasury guidance bad, but not as devastating as some rumors suggested, Halimi believes investors may be ready to leave the sidelines.

“I would have to think, now that we have all the certainty and the unknowns that we are working with are limited, that we would get back to the business-as-usual state of mind,” he said. “There’s been a lot of capital on the sidelines, and those capital allocators do have to make investments.”

Renewable Properties, however, has several projects entering construction in the next three-to-six months, Halimi noted. With the market favoring operational and late-stage construction projects, the company may unlock greater value by waiting for those projects to advance before going back to the market, Halimi said.