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Downtown Greenville, SC just continues to boom! It’s not quite like Raleigh, NC or Nashville, TN but it is now holding its own when it comes to new development of commercial and multi-family property within the city itself.
United Community Bank announced last year that they were leaving Blairsville, Georgia and relocating headquarters in downtown Greenville. They are currently building a gorgeous, state-of-the-art office building in downtown next to the newly built Grand Bohemian Lodge.
The companies involved in the design and construction of this building include Harper General Contractors, McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture, BPA Engineering, and RMF Engineering.
The building is targeted for completion at some point in 2024. It will be four stories with 118,000 SF. It right down the street from the Camperdown development in downtown Greenville. United Community Bank will be the largest bank headquartered in South Carolina. They will have about 300 employees downtown once this is completed.
I wonder how they feel about work from home :). Any, it’s great to see the continued investment happening in Greenville, SC.
There’s no doubt South Carolina has become a leading state in the rise again of domestic U.S. manufacturing. The Port of Charleston has played a huge role in the growth of manufacturing, distribution and the overall supplychain. Their Inland Port of Greer essentially extendes the Port of Charleston all the way out to the Upstate. The location of the Upstate being 90 minutes to Charlotte and 2.5 hours to Atlanta makes it a terrific location for all kinds of manufacturers who need to ship product throughout the U.S. as well as the rest of the world. The Upstate Business Journal has an excellent update on the state of industrial real estate here in Greenville. Be sure to read it.
Greenville County boasts more than 600 manufactures have operations here. That’s impressive and it only continues to grow. Greenville County is the largest county in the state of South Carolina with a current population of 514,000. Greenville County is expected to grow by 222,000 people and 86,000 jobs by 2040 as the trend across the America is for people to leave blue states for red states. It’s no wonder companies continue to expand operations here in the Upstate and specifically Greenville County.
Recently I spoke with a business owner who had been operating out of Florida. He was looking for new space for a distribution center in the Southeast. Atlanta was too big, too crowded and very expensive. Charlotte was also very expensive. Someone had told him to check out Greenville, SC and he was pleasantly surprised. He had never heard of it before but it had the infrastructure, access, ease of distribution and transportation – trucking, rail and air cargo with GSP International – and the prices were much, much better here for buildings. So he built a $2.5 million office warehouse here in Greenville.
There are many knowledgeable industrial and commercial real estate brokers in Greenville that can help you with that decision. The Greenville Area Development Corp. is also a very helpful organization for companies evaluating the Upstate.
A running joke on one of the Simpsonville Facebook Group’s that I’m part of is that when new construction starts on a particular parcels, people will jump in and try to guess what’s being built. Most of the time they are looking for new restaurants or a Trader Joes. I just published an article on this exact topic. The most common sarcastic comments tend to be…carwash, Waffle House, and dentists offices. Well I think we could now add a meme around banks being built because there have been a lot of new bank branches that have been built across Greenville County.
On Woodruff Road right now between I-385 and Five Forks, there are 3 brand new bank buildings currently being constructed. Fifth Third has made a big move into Greenville and they have two of the buildings going up. The other building is for First National Bank.
Building these bank buildings is not cheap…but again nothing is cheap today when it comes to commercial, or residential, construction. I suspect part of the differences in these prices might well be the size of the parking lots but also perhaps the site work that needed to be completed to build these buildings. For the Fifth Third buildings, they are both replacing old gas stations that were not exactly pleasing to the eye. It looks like in reading of the tax records and the building permits that each of these buildings are owned by different entities and these banks are leasing the space from them. According to the building permits filed with Greenville County, the Fifth Third Bank building at 1510 Woodruff Road will cost $1,950,000. The Fifth Third Bank building at 2608 Woodruff Road in Five Forks will cost $2,350,000. The First National Bank building at 1217 Woodruff Road will cost $1,500,000.
Here are the other two banks being built along with a list of other banks along Woodruff Road. It’s a popular location for banks I’m sure in part because the traffic counts are typically about 90,000 per day in the area.
Here’s a look at the other banks along Woodruff Road between I-385 and the Five Forks area.
Dustin Tenney, a local commercial real estate agent with SVN Blackstream, posted on the Simpsonville, SC Facebook Group basically asking the 25,000 members what would they like to see developed at the 3 sites in the pictures he posted. (Update: here’s a link to one of their Simpsonville Retail Listings ).
In less than about 12 hours, there were already over 500 comments to his post. I also live in Simpsonville as does Dustin. We have seen lots of new commercial development as the city of one of the most desirable places to live in the country right now. The joke is that if something new is being developed, it’s either a dental office, a Waffle House, a car wash or an oil change station. But Dustin Tenney and his business partner, Daniel Holloway, are looking for perhaps something that the city doesn’t have yet and he solicited the public’s opinion on it. What ensued was a lot of fun and craziness and the mentioning of an incredible amount of companies and brands. I tried to go through the post and identify the companies, stores, brands, services that people wanted to see. Frankly, it was a bit mind numbing and I only made it through maybe the first 35-40% of the comments. So my analysis below is by no means scientific and I don’t vouch that it’s 100% accurate but directionally it gives you some idea what people are looking for in terms of new development in Simpsonville, SC.
Below is Dustin Tenney’s post in the Simpsonville Residents Facebook Group:
“Simpsonville! I would love for ya’ll to provide input on these three sites and “play broker/developer”. I’m serious in my interest to hear from you – I am a resident of Simpsonville as well and do a good amount of work in our city. My business partner and I know what what we don’t need any more of, as ya’ll are very vocal about that. But sometimes we don’t always think of everything we do need.
Back story, because of the cost of the dirt, we really need national tenants here, and because it’s a major thoroughfare, national tenants are what make sense anyways. The mom and pop and regional tenants are better suited with what we have going on along Main Street around Burdette.
With that said, feel free to drop me a line here, shoot me a DM or send me an email at dustin.tenney@svn.com.
SVN Blackstream Reedy River Retail
Here’s what I came up with after combing through the post comments. If a company was mentioned, I noted how many Likes / Loves it had and have attempted to add them up on a spreadsheet. As noted above, I did not get through the entire post given the number of comments. I don’t even know if this is helpful, but clearly people want a Trader Joe’s grocery store and a Texas Roadhouse. There was also lots of interesting comments about areas needed for families and kids….skate parks, ice rinks, trampoline parks, arcades, roller skating, bounce houses, mini-golf, movie theater…but the overwhelming responses where geared toward restaurants and grocery stores. There were several comments asking for coffee shops (not Starbucks) and bookstores.
Wants Likes / Loves
7Brew 4
Academy 5
Aquatic Center 5
Barnes & Noble 22
Bingo Hall 2
BJ’s 4
Buc-ees 2
California Pizza Kitchen 2
Carrabbas 3
Cheddars 1
Chicken Salad Chick 16
Chipotle 5
Clean Eatz 5
Container Store 1
Cookout 20
Copper River Grill 1
Costa Vida 2
Costco 22
Culvers 13
Dave and Busters 3
Dunkin Donuts 9
Fazoli’s 2
Fresh Market 11
Fuddruckers 7
Go-Carts 17
Half-Price Books 4
Harris Teeter 7
Home Goods 3
IKEA 4
In-n-Out Burger 14
Indoor Bounce House 8
Jason’s Deli 8
Jimmy Johns 2
Krogers 7
Lidl 6
Logans 3
Lowe’s Foods 1
Marshall’s 8
McAlister’s 9
Menard’s 4
Mini Golf 10
Mo’ Bettahs 2
Movie Theater 3
Noodles & Company 12
Old Navy 1
Once Upon a Child (thrift) 2
Pappadeux Seafood 4
PDQ 3
Pei Wei 4
PF Changs 2
Portillo’s 5
Raising Cains 8
Red Bowl 1
Red Lobster 13
Red Robin 7
Roller Rink 5
Sam’s Club 21
Shake Shack 4
Smash Burger 4
SoftSurroundings Clothing 1
Spare Time 3
Taco Cabana 2
Taziki’s 1
Texas Roadhouse 58
Top Golf 1
Trader Joe’s 92
Trampoline Park 22
Tupelo and Honey 14
Ulta Beauty 3
Uno 2
Urban Air 17
Wegman’s 31
West Elm 7
Whataburger 20
Zoe’s Kitchen 10
Below are other images of sites Dustin Tenney and Daniel Holloway are working on in Simpsonville, SC. If you’re looking for help with retail in the area, these two are doing a great job!
Here’s a helpful link to the Masterplan for the Verdae development in Greenville, SC. This has been an ongoing development for years. They plan to have more than 10,000 residents and more than 550 businesses in this development when it’s completed. It’s the largest development in the history of Greenville. It is continuing to be developed today.
It’s exciting to see the continued growth in Greenville both in terms of housing, businesses and large employers. Here’s the main link to the Verdae Community and Development.
In South Carolina, when land is reclassified typically from agricultural land to other designations for residential and commercial development, there has been a rollback tax going back 5 years.
As ag land, the taxes are significantly lower. But if you sold your land to a developer, they would have to pay taxes going back 5 years as though that land had been fully valued lets say as commercial property. That’s a big number especially on large parcels of land. The new law, H.3596 Rollback Tax Reform, reduces the rollback tax from 5 years to 3 years effective January 1, 2021. I would indeed expect some transactions might get pushed to close after the 1st of the year.
South Carolina Association of Realtors has an excellent article discussing the impact of the rollback tax reform for 2021.
Fox Hill Business Park / Fox Carolina
The first major Class A business park development in 20 years was announced last month. The massive 172 acre development was announced by the Greenville Area Development Corporation. The development will be named Fox Hill Business Park. GADC chose New Jersey Developer, Sudler Companies to develop the property.
It’s a very impressive and ambitious plan with nearly 2.5 million square feet of development designed to meet the needs for manufacturing, distribution or warehouse. It demonstrates that there is strong belief that the growth we have seen in the Upstate of South Carolina will continue. Greenville Business Magazine’s story on the Fox Hill Business Park has a lot of excellent additional details about the development project.
Fountain Inn is within easy access to the Inland Port and GSP Airport as well as interstate 385 and 85. There is also lots of expected housing growth in the Fountain Inn area. Greenville County Schools is also building a brand new Fountain Inn High School. It’s set to open for the fall 2021 – if we ever go back to school again 🙂
NAI Earle Furman will be working with Sudler Companies to market the property.