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CHARLOTTE – Barely a year old, Steele Creek Commerce Park is already gearing up for a second phase, which would more than double its size, up to 105 acres and 1.1 million square feet.
Construction workers install glazing and exterior finishes on the front of one new warehouse-office building at Steele Creek Commerce Park. Just behind it, earth-moving equipment clears the way for the slab foundation for another. Photo by Tony Brown
And with its location at Steele Creek Road and Interstate 485, near Charlotte Douglas International Airport and the Charlotte Intermodal Facility, the park is quickly becoming an international logistics hotspot.
The 43-acre “premier business distribution center” – that’s what developer EastGroup Properties Inc. calls its high-end warehouse/office projects – broke ground in 2013.
By March of this year, two of the six buildings planned for Phase 1 were up and leased, and construction was underway on the third.
Now that the third building is complete and about half-leased, workers are putting the finishing touches on building No. 4.
As if all that weren’t enough, EastGroup in March also put in a petition with the city of Charlotte to rezone 63 acres around the park that the company has under contract for Phase 2.
“Charlotte’s industrial market is doing great,” said Matt Cochrane, senior asset manager for the Charlotte division of EastGroup, a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Jackson, Miss.
“And it is just getting stronger. We definitely want to keep the momentum going.”
The latest tenant at Steele Creek Commerce Park is Hellmann Worldwide Logistics – which, no, does not import mayonnaise.
Hellmann, which signed a seven-year lease, is the second Germany-based logistics firm (“Fed-Ex on steroids,” Cochrane said) in the park, joining Kuehne + Nagel, the park’s first tenant.
“All the folks who want to be near the airport and the intermodal are coming to us,” Cochrane said.
EastGroup is in tenant negotiations with “several active prospects” for building 4, which has a target completion date in September.
In addition to being near the airport and intermodal facility, the park sits cater-corner across the interstate from the just-opened Charlotte Premium Outlets mall, which Cochrane says helps explain the park’s visibility and accelerated growth.
As for how those buildings are going up so fast, Cochrane says it’s all about their tilt-up panel construction technique.
Workers pour a rectangular slab foundation. On the ground around it, they lay out the structural members of the four walls, and pour cement into them. Once cured, they tilt the concrete walls up, attach them to the foundation and top it off with a metal roof to tie everything together.
“It’s something to see,” Cochrane said.
Project description: EastGroup Properties is continuing to develop a warehouse-office park at the Steele Creek Road interchange with Interstate 485.
Phase 1 status: Three buildings with a combined 250,000 square feet are complete on the 42-acre site. A fourth building, with more than 56,000 square feet, is nearing completion. Two future buildings would bring the total to 465,000 square feet.
Phase 2 status: EastGroup’s petition to rezone 63 acres, from residential and industrial use to a conditional industrial designation, will have a public hearing before the Charlotte City Council on Sept. 15. If it is approved, EastGroup could add more than 640,000 additional square feet of space to the park.
About the developer: EastGroup Properties has more than 34 million square feet under management, more than 2.7 million of them in the Charlotte market, which the real estate investment trust entered in 2008. More than 90 percent of EastGroup’s Charlotte property is leased.
