Alaina Kiewit, Regional Partner, Charlotte, St. John Properties
In an interview with Invest:, Alaina Kiewit, regional partner at St. John Properties, talked about the company’s new Charlotte office and plans to expand into that market. She highlighted how the company aims to fill a gap in the market with its speculative, flex real estate product that targets smaller and diverse tenants.
What have been the main highlights and milestones for St. John Properties over the past 12 months?
Opening the office in Charlotte in December 2023 was a big milestone for us as it is our second office in North Carolina. The Charlotte office is a natural expansion from our office in Raleigh that opened around a year prior.
I have hit the ground running in terms of working and growing my network and forming long-lasting relationships with industry partners, economic development groups, jurisdictional leaders, brokers, contractors, and consultants. These relationships will be key to our success in Charlotte. They will enable me to grow my local portfolio. I am in Charlotte for the long haul and excited to be part of the growth that Charlotte has experienced.
How does the vertically integrated approach of St. John Properties benefit its client and project portfolio?
We focus on doing everything in-house from the moment someone calls us looking to lease space. Our in-house teams include leasing agents, space planners who help tenants plan and fit out the interior space, shell and interior construction teams, and property managers that work with tenants for the longevity of their tenancy. Engrained in St. John Properties employees, on our home screen when we log into our computers every morning, is “Our clients pay our paychecks, treat them accordingly”. Everything we do at St. John Properties we have a client-first mindset, including vertically integrating our business which provides value and simplicity to our clients, allowing them to focus on what they do best, running their business.
We look forward to growing our Charlotte team to support future clients. Once we have buildings and projects secured, we plan on scaling the Charlotte team similar to how we have done in other offices across the country.
What is the company’s approach to sourcing and executing investment opportunities in Greater Charlotte?
I am actively and aggressively looking for land opportunities to build our signature flex/research and development buildings in Charlotte. That means I am meeting brokers and economic development groups and cold calling landowners to find the best land opportunities that can accommodate our requirements and aspirations.
What are the most important trends in the region’s commercial real estate market?
It has been a crazy four years since COVID-19. That has dramatically shifted the way people live and work. The beauty of St. John Properties’ flex product is that it is extremely versatile. Our flex space has 18 foot clear heights and looks like a single-story office in the front, but the rear has a service court with docks and drive-in doors. That casts a wide net on the types of tenants that we can have in our buildings.
The versatility in our product opens the door for various clients to lease space in our buildings. We can have anything from a contractor that needs both a small office and warehouse space all the way to medical office suppliers, daycares, schools, and recreation or medical facilities.
How does the flex/research and development product of St. John Properties stand out in the commercial real estate sector?
When you think of the industrial real estate sector, there are several developers building large industrial buildings. Our buildings are more niche as they can offer smaller footprints for smaller tenants, down to roughly 3,000 square feet. While many developers are looking to put the largest building they can on a land parcel, we focus on cohesion with multiple smaller buildings in a business park setting.
What have been the most important shifts in demand for the products and services in St. John Properties’ portfolio?
Our bread and butter are flex buildings, but we also have office and retail products. There haven’t been any developers building new flex product at scale in Charlotte since the 1970’s and 1980’s. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from brokerage firms reassuring the need of new flex product in the Charlotte market as the existing product is outdated and dysfunctional. We hope and are excited to fill that void and bring our flex product to Charlotte.
All our flex product is built speculatively, with no tenants lined up on the roster. The versatility of our flex buildings offer tenants the opportunity to lease from 3,000 square feet of space up to a full 50,000 square foot building and anything in between.
How is St. John Properties leveraging new technologies to develop flex products?
Over more than 50 years we have refined our buildings’ design with the goal of constantly improving them for our tenants. Our clients come first, so we aim to be at the forefront of any improvement, including keeping up with new technology. For instance, our property management team has invested in the latest software for bill payment and ticketing systems for our tenants use.
Additionally, in terms of sustainability, St John Properties is one of the largest LEED developers in the country. Healthy, clean buildings are important to us, and we look forward to building high quality and caliber of buildings in Charlotte.
What strategies or initiatives will St. John Properties implement to foster community development in the region?
We look forward to being a good corporate partner in the communities where we operate throughout Charlotte and take a lot of pride in investing back in the community. St. John Properties is in Charlotte for the long term, and we aim to build not just buildings but relationships as well.
What are the main challenges that St. John Properties has encountered in terms of construction and commercial real estate?
Construction costs and financing are the two biggest challenges both industry- and nation-wide. Anybody in the commercial real estate industry is hopeful that interest rates and construction costs will go down.
What are the outlook and priorities of St. John Properties for the next two to three years in Charlotte?
We look forward to getting projects through the permitting and approval processes within the next couple of years and have some buildings come out of the ground. I am currently targeting a couple of projects around Charlotte, but we are also constantly looking for more opportunities to continue growing our portfolio.
The land sites that we look for are on main thoroughfares in dense residential areas where we can incorporate retail and flex products. If we get a site on a main road, we can put pad sites and inline retail in the front, facing the main road, with our flex/research and development buildings behind.
