(Good) night on the town.

• Author: Maurer, Kevin
• Position: NC TREND: Eastern Region

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James Goodnight, son of the richest man in North Carolina, is buying a bunch of Wilmington real estate with an eye toward helping make the city more attractive to businesses.

"Look at it from a real-estate perspective. We felt that Wilmington had some opportunities to add value, and that is through preservation of older buildings and community building," says Brian Wallace of York Properties, which represented Goodnight in his purchases.

Since 2008, the son of SAS Institute co-founder Jim Goodnight, 73, has bought and renovated commercial buildings in Raleigh and Wilmington. He has spent more than $3 million on four buildings in the Port City, purchasing his latest one in April. Three are on Front Street, downtown Wilmington's main thoroughfare running parallel to the Cape Fear River, which sports more than a dozen restaurants, bars and shops.

Goodnight's most recent addition is 9 South Front St., an 1899 building that housed a restaurant, Caffe Phoenix, for 23 years. A new restaurant will occupy the first floor, and the second floor will likely be offices, according to the Greater Wilmington Business Journal. Meetinghouse Properties, a limited liability company associated with Goodnight, paid $1.84 million for the building in March, property records show.

Goodnight renovated a former nightclub at 21 S. Front St. last year for the corporate office of Next Glass, a Wilmington-based software company. Real-estate records show Meetinghouse paid $675,000 for the...