Commercial Confidential: Steel Yard at South End

Editor’s note: “Commercial Confidential” is a Mecklenburg Times profile of a commercial property in the Charlotte area. 

Rhea Greene knows that the Steel Yard at South End isn’t for everyone.

Steel Yard at South End boasts an occupancy rate 14 percentage points higher than the South End office average. Photo by Payton Guion

Companies looking for cookie-cutter office space in the average high-rise or office park probably won’t quite feel at home at the Steel Yard, with its concrete floors and exposed masonry.

But Greene, partner at Charlotte-based Trinity Partners, which handles leasing for the Steel Yard, said the three buildings that make up the property are a perfect fit for “creative-type firms” that also will apreciate the surrounding vibe in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood.

“We’re not a traditional office build-out,” she said. “And we try to find companies that are looking for that, and we encourage them to continue that build-out.”

In upfitting their spaces, some tenants at the Steel Yard have done stained concrete floors or built only six-foot-high (rather than to-the-ceiling) walls, thus keeping the exposed ceilings and walls in view, Greene said. Tenants in some of her other properties, such as in SouthPark or uptown, aren’t interested in such things, she said.

But because the Steel Yard is a niche product, Greene said leasing the property can sometimes offer a challenge.

“It’s a little more difficult because of the pipeline of tenants,” she said. “Since you’re not going to speak to everyone and every tenant out there, then you’ve narrowed down your options.

“But our hit rate is much higher than some of the more traditional product.”

Greene said that despite appealing to fewer potential tenants than the average office space, the Steel Yard has little in the way of competition for unorthodox space, which has helped it have a much higher occupancy rate, 94 percent, than the rest of South End office space, which is at 80 percent.

“The Design Center has a similar type of product,” Greene said. “But it’s not like we’re talking about a million square feet of space like this.”

GUION can be reached at [email protected], (704) 817-1344 or on Twitter at @paytonguion.

Center name: Steel Yard at South End

Address: 1900 South Blvd.

Square feet: 82,000

Year opened: The property was  opened for office uses in the mid-1990s, Greene said.

Owner: Trinity Capital Advisors; and Urdang Real Estate Investment Advisors of Plymouth Meeting, Pa.

Leasing company: Trinity Partners

Lease rates: $23.75

Vacancy rate: 6 percent

Major tenants and square feet occupied: Cisco Systems (13,000); Sullivan’s Steakhouse (8,000); Tire Intelligence (7,000)

Did you know? One of the three buildings in Steel Yard dates back to the 1920s.