2 min read July 2023 — Lamar Wakefield, national practice leader of Nelson Worldwide, spoke with Invest: about the successes of new developments in the area. Wakefield explained the process of determining values for each project to ensure their effectiveness. He touched on the influence of hybrid working and impacts of high interest rates on profits and productivity.
What recent projects have you completed?
We’ve broken our company up into verticals. Each of the verticals, whether it’s healthcare, workplace, asset, strategy or industrial, has a national practice leader. As of 2022, I’m the national practice leader for mixed-use. We have 23 offices around the country, so we all combine our collective marketing capabilities to go after some of the mixed-use opportunities in the nation. There’s a new paradigm for development these days, where people want what we call “the 15-minute city.” The idea is that you can get to any part of Atlanta in 15 minutes or less and never have to leave the immediate area, whether for living, working or playing purposes. Since completing The Battery for the Braves, quite a few other opportunities have opened up for us around the country with Major League Baseball and football teams. We’ve developed master plans for the Brewers, the White Sox, the Broncos, the Angels and a big D package for the Diamondbacks. It’s been a lot of fun. We’ve also taken that to the minor league level for the Augusta Green Jackets.
How is the current economic situation impacting your work?
People keep asking if we are going to go into recession. I can tell you right now, we are in a recession. The debt markets and capital markets are dead. There’s a lot of planning going on to try to get things moving forward. There are obviously ways to get money through pension funds and high net worth individuals can start projects, but it’s a very difficult task for conventional financing. Things have really slowed down from that perspective. We have targets for each of our verticals, but my backlog is much bigger than my target. So far, we’re able to weather this okay.
How do you determine the needs of a project?
When we get ready to start a project, we establish a set of core values for it. For our Avalon project we had nine core values, but every project is a little bit different. There are some regular ones that always supersede, like prioritizing sustainability, walkability and advanced technology. We have to always make sure we include those kinds of things. At the same time, there are particularities. For example, at Avalon, five-star hospitality and services were necessary. So here at this particular development unit, tenants can have access to an Avalon card, which allows them to simply type in grocery requests and this will be placed in the refrigerator for them. Those without a reservation will also be prioritized. There are valet and concierge services throughout. The needs of The Battery were different. The core value perspective showed that The Battery was going to be more food and beverage entertainment than soft, sophisticated retailing like we have at Avalon. For each project, we start with this core value outline.
How does diversity among employees benefit design?
We have an amazing design team. Here in Atlanta, we have a Director of Design. None of our designers are U.S. born, but they’re all U.S. citizens. We have employees from Egypt, Colombia, Mexico and India, design professionals with different experiences, different education and different outlooks on the quality of design. It gives us a deep bench of ideas. We don’t always agree on design, but we call this creative friction. We get in these rooms and debate so we can understand our core values, where we’re trying to head with this client and what the budget is. We also try to find the very best design work we can do that differentiates us from the other players. I think we have the skills to do that in our toolbox.
How is Nelson growing in Atlanta and beyond?
Because of what’s happened in the workforce, because the pandemic has given us so much remote working, we’ve had to shift our focus. You have to adjust when the economy shifts. My vertical has really grown and we’re under demand. Our asset strategy is growing around what to do with existing facilities to make them more desirable from a workplace perspective. Some are being converted to residential. There’s a shift in the office mode and we don’t know when it might come back, but it’s hard to grow in this business being alone in your home. We’ve encouraged our workers to get back to the office at least three days a week.
What are your expectations for the next few years in the market?
It’s about being proactive. We can’t just expect the phone to ring; instead, we have to figure out which one of the market subsets has the opportunity to expand and go chase that. We’re going to see a little bit of languishing in the regular markets for the next 18 months or so. We think the rates will begin going the other direction this time next year. That will help, but the cost of construction will still be very high. It’s unbelievably difficult to underwrite a project right now, even if it’s multifamily, based on costs of the project as well as the debt costs. I think we’ll see a very moderate growth in architecture over the next couple of years due to interest rates, and then I think we’ll be back pretty strong after that.
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