By LC Leach III
Whether large or small commercial, industrial, office, retail, residential or space dedicated to tourism and vegetation, the current real estate market in South Carolina is on the rise looking for a place to pop.
And during the inaugural SC Leadership Exchange webinar in November, real estate experts from Greenville, Charleston and Columbia said that once the Coronavirus (Covid-19) is over, the outbreak will happen almost anywhere in the state – from mountains to foothills. to sand hills and coast.
“I would not like to be anywhere else in the country right now, except in South Carolina,” said David Lockwood, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Colliers International South Carolina. “In the coming years, South Carolina and the Southeast will be the beneficiaries of a lot of excellent activity.”
Part of Lockwood’s optimism was illustrated with factors and data that influence the real estate sector, as compiled by Colliers, including:
• Occupation of the Industrial Sector. Comparing the third quarter of 2020 with the third quarter of 2019 across the state, occupancy rates in industrial space increased by an average of 1.3 percent in Columbia and Charleston.
• Occupation of the Office Sector. Comparing the third quarter of 2020 further with the third quarter of 2019, occupancy rates in the office sector fell by an average of just 1.75% in Charleston and Greenville.
• Employment. In the four major economic areas of South Carolina, Columbia, Charleston and Upstate around Greenville and Spartanburg counties, employment during Covid-19 fell by a state average of just 3%.
“The figures do not reflect the full effects of the pandemic, which we will begin to see in the fourth quarter of 2020,” said Lockwood.
• Education. Approximately 46% of the Charleston workforce currently holds a bachelor’s, master’s or associate’s degree – compared to Columbia with around 43% and Greenville-Spartanburg with about 40%.
Lockwood said that this factor gives Charleston’s job market and, therefore, its housing market, an advantage over other parts of the state because of the “higher level of education for people who move into that area”.
• Residential properties. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, South Carolina is in the middle of a huge market for residential sellers.
For example, the Greater Greenville Association of Realtors reports that, from June to October 2020, homes and residential properties in Greenville surpassed the 7,500 sales mark – compared to 6,564 units sold during the same period in 2019.
Lockwood said that in the future he expects this trend to become even stronger.
“Residential drives commercial and South Carolina is a hot state to move in,” said Lockwood. “We are seeing people returning to the suburbs, and a shift from dense apartments to smaller residential units … so that they can be protected in this pandemic environment.”
And Bob Nuttall, managing director of the commercial real estate agency Lee & Associates in Charleston, pointed out that he and other colleagues sometimes experience the luxury of selling without selling.
“People in the northeast are buying oceanfront properties without being seen,” said Nuttall. “Kiawah, for example, has just broken two monthly sales records in terms of dollars traded because of demand for coastal properties.”
• Parking. In Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, Lockwood said people are holding – and continuing to pay high monthly fees – parking spaces “even if they are working remotely and haven’t been in the office for seven months”.
“We do a survey of parking fees in SC, and the interesting thing is that employees and companies have not given up their vacancies,” he said. “(Which tells me that) our South Carolina companies are dying to get back into office and are maintaining the parking lot because they don’t want to lose control of it.”
Charles Gouch, senior vice president of CBRE, a commercial real estate services company in Greenville, added that while Covid-19 has put 850,000 square feet of real estate back into the sublet market, the signs are already pointing for what could be a record post-coronavirus boom.
“We have a huge number of groups that are ‘circulating’,” he said. “We are getting a lot of inquiries from Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Jersey – all of these markets have companies that are looking for us in our area.”
When asked about the future of all forms of real estate in South Carolina after the end of the pandemic, Gouch, Nuttall and Lockwood agreed that South Carolina is prepared to exit the pandemic better than many other states because land, offices, and industrial sites here are expected to catch up and remain in high demand.
“Charleston will have more than a million inhabitants by 2030, and I still prefer to be here than in other major cities,” said Nuttall. “We live here, so we are biased. But for a business climate, I think we have one of the best states out there.”