I’ve been telling people for a while, if you want to make a bet on if Greenville is going to be one of the best places to live and invest in America, just check out how many banks are either getting a footprint here or are expanding.
My work entails paying attention to the properties that are selling because of the cost segregation work I do with building owners. I happened to see published in the Upstate Business Journal that Pinnacle Bank closed on an empty 1.45 acre lot located at 811 E. Butler Road, Greenville, SC. This looks to be about 1/3rd of a mile from the I-385 / Butler Road interchange. This area is continuing to develop. According to county tax records, the bank paid $1,050,000 on May 8, 2024. According to UBJ, Taylor Allen, Brantley Anderson and Bailey Tollison of Colliers represented the bank. Congrats to those brokers on the sale as well as to Pinnacle Bank on it’s land acquisition for a new branch presumably.
BTW, I am not familiar with Pinnacle Bank and in looking up some information, it’s kind of hard to tell exactly who they are. There have been and continue to be lots of banking mergers so I don’t know if they will actually go by the name, Pinnacle Bank, when this branch opens up – if that’s what they do with the land.
In what has to be one of the coolest new projects in the City of Greenville, the much anticipated Spinx Market is getting closer to reality. The folks at Spinx have requested that the city allow them to operate from 5am until 2am. This will be fantastic and I see no reason why the city should deny this request. The design is spectacular by SHLTR Architects and this kind of convenience store is much needed in this part of town in Greenville’s historic West End.
I was in downtown recently for the Artisphere weekend and walked by where the Spinx Market will be located. This was from Mother’s Day – mid May 2024. It’s in an absolutely killer location.
One of the things I decided to do this year is to try to get to as many events and festivals as possible in downtown Greenville. There is always so much going on especially in the summer! So this year was the first year we were able to go to the Greenville Greek Festival! I’m glad we did!
The festival takes place on the grounds of Saint George Greek Orthodox Church located at 406 N. Academy St., Greenville, SC. It was a cloudy day for us on Saturday but the rain held off all day and the crowds were good.
It costs $3 per person to get into the Greek Festival. There was of course lots of amazing Greek food available for purchase. There was music and dance as well. The dances were on a schedule and various age groups would perform throughout the day.
We had an opportunity to also go see inside the church. I had never been in there before. In the lower level of the church, they had their icons on display. Those were beautiful and they had explainations of Greek Orthodox and church history in relation to the Catholic Church and protestantism. We then went upstairs to see the main church and it was gorgeous. I have one picture of it below.
We’ll go back again. The one thing we did not take in was were all the vendors were. I would have liked to have seen that but will do that next years.
Greenville, South Carolina was the “textile capital of the world” back in the day before everything closed down and moved to China. In its wake has been left abandoned mills scattered throughout the Upstate. Many of these have been converted and renovated back to life and Judson Mill is no exception. But this redevelopment or reuse of the mill has delivered a spectacular adaptation of mixed-use.
If you want to read more about this amazing project, be sure to read the in-depth article published about Judson Mill by the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.
Be sure to check out the Judson Mill District website.
There isn’t a week that goes by it seems without Greenville, SC being named to some list of top places to live, work, vacation and invest. This past week, Greenville, SC was named a Top 10 Most Beautiful and Affordable Places to Live by Travel & Leisure Magazine. Those of us who live here have known this for quite some time but it’s still nice to see the recognition.
People all over the country are evaluating where there are living like never before. The Covid-19 Pandemic allowed people to work from home which means they could live anywhere. Why continue to live in an area that has winter for 4-6 months out of the year when you could live elsewhere? Why live in a over regulated blue state with the heavy hand of government when you could live in a state with better weather, access to beaches and mountains and where the government doesn’t try to control every aspect of your life? South Carolina is a great option and tens of thousands of people have discovered it.
If you’re thinking of moving from some cold, blue state in the north, Midwest or NE, feel free to give me a call and I’d be happy to tell you about Greenville and the Upstate. Call me at 864-276-1448. I’m a licensed real estate broker with eXp Realty in both SC and MN. SC License #113522.
Will Greenville County and the Upstate remain a bastion of conservative values? It’s hard to say. My experience tells me that the people here tend to be more conservative than the elected officials and certainly more conservative than those who drive the front facing economic development groups. It seems that Greenville / Upstate business and economic development leaders and have embraced ESG, Black Lives Matter, DEI and LGBTQ+ initiatives. These initiatives must be promoted until the population embraces the movement…especially in conservative Greenville…right?
Recently I attended the annual meeting for the Upstate SC Alliance at the Greenville Convention Center. There had to be between 500-750 people in attendance. The Upstate SC Alliance does a great job of promoting the Upstate and tries to recruit companies to establish themselves here. That’s great. But I was caught off guard a bit when one of the leaders said from the stage that the Alliance supports Black Lives Matter. They then went on to play a promotional video that also had some BLM messaging in it. I understand that if they are trying to recruit companies from around the world that they have to demonstrate that Greenville, SC and the Upstate are not home to Southern hicks…but I don’t see that that is necessary. Greenville has a phenomenally diverse employer and employee base already without having to try to overly promote how “progressive” the New South has become. The fact is, Greenville and the Upstate is not progressive nor do I think most of the people want to be progressive. And yet, our elected officials, company execs and economic development leaders and groups continue to promote this. Now of course there is the big push for LGBTQ+ initiatives. Really? Must the Upstate demonstrate it’s commitment to LGBTQ+ in order to have a company move to South Carolina? Is this the way our leaders think? Is this how the executives and growth and development teams at the target companies think? Is this just how BIG business thinks? Does the company that runs a $50 million manufacturing business require that the Upstate have progressive initiatives when it comes to these matters?
I had a chuckle a bit when I read that economic development groups state how important ESG is to proper growth and development. As a bystander out here looking from the outside in, it would seem to me that the tide is turning against ESG and yet we are making a bigger commitment to it. I suspect the ESG thing is driven from the very top of the economy and if you want the money, you have to commit to ESG. It will take time to expose the fraud and grift that is ESG investing.
If you want to keep the Upstate the delightful southern conservative place that it has been without the full embrace of big city, big corporation, big government progressive policies, then you’re going to have to get involved and speak up. It’s unlikely we’ll see these kinds of policies and initiatives come from our county councils. It will come from the City of Greenville, the economic development organizations the big companies themselves and the public schools. Here’s the Post and Courier story about the progress being made on LGBTQ matters.
Greenville Business Magazine is out with its annual 50 Most Influential Leaders this year. It offers a good mix of leadership from business, real estate, health care, banking, education, public activism etc.
GSP, otherwise known as Greenville-Spartanburg Airport will begin an $18 million road improvement project in front of the main terminal building to try to help deal with the increase in traffic. We’ve been reading for a numbrer of years now about the growing shipping and passenger traffic coming in and out of GSP. Well that’s finally catching up and there is a need to make some improvements.
The project is expected to last for about the next two years. GSP is one of those really pleasant surprises so many people have when they come down here. It’s a lovely small airport that packs a pretty big punch. Yes, we do often have to make connections, but more and more there are direct flights in and out of here. Often the short hops are just to Charlotte or Atlanta which take no more than about 20 minutes in the air. You can get to just about anywhere in the country from either of those airports if you can’t reach your destination directly form GSP.
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.
This article caught my attention today in the Post and Courier about a group of people that is looking to restore many of the forgotten cemeteries scattered throughout the Upstate.
If you are reading this from far away and haven’t spend much time here in the Upstate of South Carolina, one of the things that may catch your attention when you come to visit is how many cemetaries there are. It’s a testiment to the long history of the state and how many people were here long before us. It also often seems like they are found in random locations but that’s because they were here first and development sprung up all around these cemetaries.
Prior to coming to South Carolina nearly four years ago, I had lived in Minnesota and prior to that we were in California. As a kid I also lived in North Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois and North Carolina. I don’t ever recall seeing so many cemeteries. In the upper midwest things are planned out and cemeteries tend to occupy large plots of land. But in South Carolina, cemeteries might just be an acre or two of ground where the early settlers decided that’s where they wanted to bury their dead.
I don’t know about you, but I like cemeteries. I’m always amazed at thinking about how many people were here before we were and wondering about their lives and how challenging their lives must have been. History runs deep here in South Carolina and it’s one of the things I really love about the area.
There are some amazing cemeteries to visit here in South Carolina if you’re in to that kind of thing or maybe a history buff. Here’s some information on the historic cemeteries in Greenville. The Springwood Cemetery in downtown Greenville is incredible and worthy of a visit. There’s also quite the cemetery in downtown Simpsonville, SC as well.