Good things come in smaller packages.

• Position: Commercial building construction - Industry Overview

Projects such as Corning's $250 million fiber-optics plant expansion in Wilmington and 3C Alliance's $100 million-plus battery plant in Alamance County hogged the headlines in 1995, but commercial construction's supporting cast deserved a hand, too.

"Folks up here don't read the papers," says Steve Gentry, building supervisor in Buncombe County, where new commercial construction nearly doubled in 1995. "They don't know construction is supposed to be slowing down."

Despite projects with nine-figure price tags, the trend in nonresidential construction was a steady flow of smaller jobs. Quaker Oats Co.'s $13 million plant in Asheville and a $3 million Hampton Inn in Transylvania County were among them. "That's our first new hotel in Brevard since 1950," says Transylvania County Development Director Don Schronce.

Statewide, permits for new commercial construction through September totaled $1.47 billion, about 27% ahead of 1994, according to Bennett Allen, N.C. Department of Labor statistician. Granted, many of the projects are smaller. But lenders say that reflects optimism among small manufacturers and businesses, despite constant muttering about a cooling economy.

In September, Oncor International, a national research firm, found downtown vacancies of about 5% for Charlotte, 6% for Raleigh-Durham and 9.2% for Winston-Salem, putting them among the nation's tightest office markets. But there was no rush to fill the demand.

"Both Raleigh and Charlotte have healthy economies, and as such, they're creating a lot of demand for office space," says Eric Karnes, whose Karnes Research Co. tracks commercial-real-estate trends in the Triangle and Charlotte. "But they were vastly overbuilt in the late 1980s, and that put the kibosh on any speculative building."

By November, Raleigh had more than 1 million square feet of mostly pre-leased office space under construction. Charlotte had nearly 1.5 million feet, although nearly a third was in the $100 million Transamerica Square, a downtown mixed-use project anchored by the California-based insurance company.

Just as ground was being broken on that project, NationsBank and Trammell Crow Commercial Inc. announced a $170 million project two blocks away - a 30-story office tower with adjoining residential high-rise to be completed in 1997.

Durham took an aggressive approach called fast-tracking to ease its squeeze, says Thomas White, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce's economic-development arm. The...