Avison Young to market 302-unit Uptown Charlotte apartments

Avison Young has been retained to market Savoy Apartments, the 302-unit Class A rental community at 650 E. Brooklyn Village Ave. in Uptown Charlotte, and the assignment lands at a brokerage two years into repairing its balance sheet. The six-story building carries four ground-floor retail suites, a mix of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom floorplans and a pool, coworking space, fitness center, pet amenities and covered parking, and the marketing material puts occupancy above 95%. James Nelson, Erik Edeen, James Hanson, Steven Peden and Kim Troeller are running the assignment.

No asking price or bid appears in the coverage, so the only number attached to the asset is the county's most recent assessment of about $90.3 million, roughly $299,000 a unit. Creek Lane and Proffitt Dixon bought the 2.6-acre site in January 2017 for $4.5 million, began construction shortly afterward and opened the building in 2019, according to the Charlotte Business Journal.

The more telling number is the land basis: $4.5 million for 2.6 acres comes to about $1.73 million an acre, and the distance between that and the $90.3 million assessment on the finished building is the development margin the sponsors captured by buying in early 2017 and delivering in 2019. A county assessment is not a price; it can sit above or below what a buyer will pay, so $90.3 million works as a reference point rather than a floor.

Avison Young returned to creditors in August for a second recapitalization in two years, cutting debt and preferred equity by nearly 70% and bringing lenders into common equity, as this publication reported. The acquisitions credit line attached to the deal made the repaired balance sheet an acquisition mandate as much as a repair job, and winning the marketing on that Uptown community is the fee-earning side of that same franchise.

First-half sales volume rose 14.7% even as the policy rate sat far above its pre-2022 norm, which points to equity spreads rather than rate cuts as the variable that sets price. A construction market repriced by the data center build-out sharpens the case for owning the building that already exists: nondata developers now bid against hyperscaler budgets for labor, materials and debt, and projects that cannot clear the equity check are the supply that will not arrive.

Savoy's advantage is that it does not need a construction draw to exist. Any bid that emerges now gets read against the county's $299,000-a-unit mark, which is the building's only price reference.