Adam Lipkin knew it would be challenging to land a loan from a traditional lender for a Houston-area office building owned by a sovereign wealth fund.

He needed to find a lender willing to back the single-tenant office property in Houston’s Clear Lake submarket, a building owned by Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation in the South Pacific. The Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust was created to invest the proceeds from a state-owned mining company in U.S. real estate.