RBN Conference Recap - Music City, USA
Last week, Isabella Sorrentino, Chris Waldburger, and I, as well as over 30 other RBN members from around the country embarked on a trip to the Music City representing ROI Commercial Real Estate for the Retail Brokers Network (RBN) Southeast Regional Retreat, hosted by our Nashville affiliate Centennial Retail Services (thank you Arthur Perlen, Joey Valenti, and Barry Hardwick for your hospitality). It’s always great to catch up with old friends and new and tell war stories about real estate deals.
If you ever visit Nashville and decide to venture out past Lower Broadway and the Honky Tonks (fun fact – all establishments that serve liquor on Lower Broadway are required to have live music until 2am), you’ll find that Nashville is a fascinating place. Here’s what we learned:
Nashville is blowing up, in a good way. We sat through an impressive presentation by Jeff Hite who is the Chief Economic Development Officer at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce.
At present, there are 45 construction cranes gracing the skyline (2nd most in the country compared to 51 in #1 Los Angeles). The Nashville Yards project is home to Amazon HQ2 and many of said crane. Several other corporations call Nashville home as well, from Oracle, Asurion, Bridgestone, Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors, and many more. Click here to see the interactive map of the big projects going on in the area.
We rode around in a bus for a few hours to learn that real estate pricing is pretty insane. From land, to homes, to retail rents. Land is going for up and over $25M/acre if locations are in ‘the core’ and can go vertical, and still well north of $1M/acre for pad sites.
As for the housing market, we learned a new term called ‘tall skinnys’, and no it’s not a new coffee from Starbucks. A lot of the old home lots are large, and in order to get in the most desirable neighborhoods developers are buying the old existing single story home sites. They raze the house, and then replace the one house with 2 narrow 3-story homes in its place. BOOM - Tall Skinny!
Retail rents in the better areas start in the $60 psf zip code and go into the hundreds. Crazy.
Restaurants are also a really big thing here and there are tons of amazing places to eat. There are lots of chef driven concepts, and Sam Fox is one of them who has made a huge investment in the city with multiple concepts. He also teamed up with Justin Timberlake to create the Twelve Thirty Club at 5th + Broadway in Brookfield Properties impressive new project 5th+B, and our group was lucky enough to have rooftop drinks and dinner there (thanks again Arthur and Joey). Make a point to stop by there next time you get to town. And Nashville the claimed birthplace for hot chicken. Some of the crew were trying to decide who served the best hot chicken in town. My favorite is Party Fowl.
And although we didn’t see any walking around, lots of celebrities live there too, check out the list. From Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel who just moved, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, a lot of country music stars (of course), and even Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant and lots of former athletes make Nashville their home.
Last but not least, I found out that Nashville has a new MLS team – Nashville SC. The stadium built in their Fairgrounds site but is essentially in a residential neighborhood. It looks very cool, but wonder how difficult it is to load and unload?
It’s always good to get out of the touristy areas of tourist cities. I recommend doing so next time you visit Nashville. It did not disappoint.