Standing on the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in downtown Nashville, you can look in any direction and see why the city is considered the hottest place in the country for commercial real estate investment.
Developers delivered 9.5 million square feet of new office and industrial space in 2021, commercial real estate company Colliers Nashville reports. More is coming to the region, where job creation is outpacing the rest of the nation and demand for office, industrial and retail space is growing.
Looking north from the Seigenthaler Bridge, one can see the site on the east bank of the Cumberland River where Oracle plans to create a $1.2 billion tech campus. The company expects to create 8,500 jobs at an average annual salary of $100,000-plus.
A bit farther north is the site of The Riverside, where Ewing Properties wants to create a $2.5 billion mixed-use development of office, restaurant, retail and residential spaces.
On the west side of the downtown skyline, Nashville Yards is rising in the old rail yard between Broadway and Charlotte Pike. The 16-acre site will have more than 5 million square feet of office, residential, entertainment and retail space.
When its second tower is complete in 2023, e-commerce giant Amazon will have more than 1 million square feet of office space in Nashville Yards, where it expects to create 5,000 corporate and technology jobs at its new Operations Center of Excellence.
Amazon’s announcement in 2018 was the largest single jobs commitment by a company in Tennessee’s history – until it was surpassed by Oracle in 2021.
“Nashville’s success is essentially the result of a public-private partnership” in which the city offers developers targeted incentives while simultaneously investing in public, civic projects, commercial real estate developer Tyler Cauble says.
The results add up to more than the sum of their parts, he says.
Nashville is now hottest of the hot
The Urban Land Institute has named Nashville No. 1 on its ranking of the 10 hottest commercial real estate markets for 2022. Here are its Top 10 cities:
- Nashville
- Raleigh/Durham
- Phoenix
- Austin
- Tampa/St. Petersburg
- Charlotte
- Dallas/Ft. Worth
- Atlanta
- Seattle
- Boston
“One plus one equals three,” says Cauble, founding principal of The Cauble Group, a locally based commercial real estate company and the bestselling author of “Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate.”
Geodis Park is an example of Nashville’s public-private partnerships. Located in the renovated Fairgrounds, the 30,000-seat facility is the largest soccer-specific stadium in the country and positions the city to host the World Cup. Taxpayers and private investors are sharing the roughly $335 million cost of the stadium.
Naming rights are held by Geodis, a France-based logistics company with operations in the Nashville region.
Cauble expects the city’s investment in the stadium to pay off for years to come.
“You don’t have to like soccer to understand the impact of hosting the World Cup,” he points out.
Signs of Nashville’s willingness to invest in itself are everywhere downtown. At the east end of the Seigenthaler Bridge, the Tennessee Titans play football in 69,143-seat Nissan Stadium, built in 1999. The city, state and the Titans are making plans for a $2 billion roofed stadium next door. It would serve as an anchor for the River North development, which includes Oracle’s campus.
The restored Seigenthaler Bridge is another investment. At 3,150 feet, it is one of the longest pedestrian bridges in the world and has been compared by visitors to the Highline, the linear park in New York City built along a disused elevated railway.
Tyler Cauble owner of The Cauble Group stands outside The Wash, an outdoor food hall he recently developed in East Nashville.
-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The LedgerOn the west side of the bridge, the 6,800-seat Ascend Amphitheater sits on the site where in 1974 Nashville opened the nation’s first waste-to-energy facility. For the next 30 years, the Thermal Transfer Plant burned trash to heat and cool downtown buildings.
The opening of Ascend in 2015 marked the full emergence of SoBro, South of Broad, as downtown’s new center.
Such civic partnerships are “crucial to a city’s growth,” Cauble says.
A short walk from Ascend is the 30-story tower that is headquarters for Bridgestone Americas, Schermerhorn Symphony Center, a Hilton and other hotels, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Bridgestone Arena, where the NHL Predators play, and Music City Center, the city’s 1.2 million-square-foot convention center.
All are within walking distance of the loading docks where dump trucks laden with toxic ash once rolled out of the Thermal Transfer Plant and through downtown’s streets on their way to a landfill.
Around the corner on Lower Broad are tourist destinations and honky tonks including Tootsie’s and Acme Feed & Seed.
“The CBD (Central Business District) is not just a business district. It’s an entertainment district. They call Nashville an 18-hour city,” Cauble adds.
A greenway connects SoBro with Rolling Mill Hill, the former home of the city’s public hospital now repurposed as a growing neighborhood of apartments and condominiums, including affordable housing reserved for artists.
Developers are scouring both sides of the Cumberland River for buildable land similar to the tract upon which Oracle is building its $1.2 billion headquarters.
-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The LedgerTo the west is the Gulch, once a derelict 62-acre rail yard that in 2000 MarketStreet Enterprises began transforming into the first LEED-certified neighborhood in the South. The latest developments in the Gulch include the new One 22 One Building at 1221 Broadway. The 24-story building has 365,000 square feet of office space and 15,000 square feet of retail space.
On downtown’s north side is First Horizon Park, the city’s minor league baseball park, which anchors the thriving Germantown neighborhood. The 10,000-seat stadium opened in 2015 not far from where a rendering plant once spread noxious odors across downtown.
(This reporter recalls stepping out of his office on Second Avenue North late on hot summer nights and encountering the lamentable combination of rendering plant odors and Thermal Transfer Plant dump trucks spewing ash as they passed by.)
The new Tennessee State Museum opened around the corner from the Sounds ballpark in 2018. The museum is next door to the new state Library and Archives building, Nashville’s renovated Farmer’s Market and Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park.
A block away Boyle Investment Co. and Northwestern Mutual continue to develop Capitol View, a 32-acre mixed-use district in the area known as the North Gulch.
Capitol View includes 1,100,000 square feet of office space and is home to the corporate offices of Lifeway and several subsidiaries of hospital company HCA.
Capitol View also includes 130,000 square feet of specialty retail and restaurants, a hotel, 378 upscale apartments, a park and trails connecting to the city’s greenway system.
“Cities don’t get to the place Nashville is unintentionally,” says Janet Miller, CEO of Colliers Nashville.
The Wash consists of six bays, five restaurants and one bar. It also has outdoor seating along with a fireplace.
-- Photos By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger“So many leaders, public and private, laid down the framework for success starting 25 years ago,” she adds. “We built an arena without a sports team, which then led to the location of the Predators here. Having an NFL team is often a criterion for corporate headquarters relocations.
“We built a world-class symphony hall and a first-class central downtown library. We invested in greenways. And we nurtured and embraced our music industry, which provides soul to the city.”
Major employers are noticing. Wall Street giant AllianceBernstein relocated its global headquarters from New York City and moved into Fifth + Broadway, the development on the site of Nashville’s old convention center.
AllianceBernstein announced it was bringing 1,050 jobs to Middle Tennessee. It soon announced the creation of 200 additional jobs.
“AllianceBernstein made me realize Nashville was on a much bigger playing field. A Wall Street behemoth leaving New York City and coming to Nashville,” Cauble notes.
Located next door to the Ryman Auditorium, Fifth + Broadway includes The Place, a 34-story apartment tower, 372,000 square feet of class-A office space and 200,000 square feet of dining, entertainment and retail space. It is home to the National Museum of African American Music.
A few blocks west, the new Broadwest mixed-use development occupies a full city block at 1600 West End Avenue, Broadwest’s master plan includes a 21-story office tower with 510,000 square feet of Class AA space, an adjacent 34-story tower with high-end condominiums and a luxury Conrad Nashville hotel, 125,000 square feet of retail and creative space and a 1.5-acre plaza. Broadwest was developed by Huntsville, Alabama-based Propst Development.
Commercial real estate development in Nashville is a story of neighborhoods and districts emerging after years of neglect or being overlooked. The latest is Dickerson Pike, also known as U.S. Highway 41, on the city’s north side.
Cauble and partners launched a new multiuse development, named US-41, on a couple of acres at 2801-2809 Dickerson Pike. It includes another site for East Nashville’s restaurant concept, The Wash, offering modular micro-kitchens that provide restaurant entrepreneurs an affordable place to start their business.
Located on a former industrial site that once was home to a truck-repair shop and other uses, US-41 will have a brewery, a diner, retail and other uses as well as community gathering spaces such as a dog park, a playground and an event lawn for concerts and festivals. More than 80% of the land at US-41 will be open space.
“We’re trying to champion the small-business community” by providing affordable commercial spaces, Cauble says.
Not far from US-41, Cauble is developing Salt Ranch, a boutique hotel at the former site of the Congress Inn. He also has another site for The Wash concept at Gallatin Pike and Douglas Avenue. Located in a former car wash, it offers space for five micro restaurants.
“Nashville has a lot going for it that a lot of cities don’t. We have massive room for growth,” Cauble says. “Then there’s the culture, the atmosphere here.”