Looking up.

AuthorMayfield, Lisa Pritchard
PositionReal estate developers

Laid low by what happened in the early '90s, developers raise their sights. But they remain grounded in reality.

Landon Wyatt, a partner in Charlotte-based Childress Klein Properties, still thinks about the bad old days sometimes. "The early 1990s were a depressing time for the real-estate market, literally," he says. One day in 1991, he was looking out his office window, watching the rain pour down. Under the dim cloud cover, he had a numbing moment of clarity. For the first time since Childress Klein had been in business, he says, "the rain didn't cause a construction delay - because we didn't have anything under construction."

It was Childress Klein's low point, but it's now a distant, albeit distinct, memory. Recovery was slow until the second half of 1993, Wyatt says, when commercial real-estate development really started picking up steam. That carried through 1995, but it only partly makes up for what happened in the early '90s, which he says was more a depression than a recession. "The economic pundits would say we're in the fifth year of expansion, but real estate has really just seen two to two-and-a-half years of good expansion."

Wyatt, the partner in charge of the industrial division, says that's true across the state. North Carolina has seen a resurgence in demand - vacancy rates in office, industrial and retail space are often single-digit, sometimes as low as 1%. Lenders are still cautious but more willing to finance new development than a few years ago. A rebirth of interest in both office and industrial space has led the way.

Childress Klein had the most square footage under development in the state last year, and it led the industrial category in BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's rankings of North Carolina's busiest developers.

BNC divided developers into three market sectors - office, industrial and retail - and ranked them by the size of projects under way in 1995. BNC had put its annual list on hold after the August 1992 issue because the ranks were so thin, but in 1995 many developers were back in the game. Tom Coyle, the partner in charge of Childress Klein's office division, says, "1995 was easily our most active year in recent history."

Technically, Childress Klein doesn't have anything but recent history to go on. In April 1988, Don Childress was running an Atlanta office for Dallas-based Trammell Crow Co., and Fred Klein was running a Charlotte office. That's when they first talked about starting their own business. It...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT