William Haygood, Managing Partner, Co-Founder, Boundary Street Advisors
Invest: sat down with William Haygood, managing partner of Boundary Street Advisors, to discuss the real estate market in Charlotte and how it’s changing the game, broadening its footprint with new service offerings and continuing to expand.
What have been Boundary Street Advisors’ most significant developments or achievements in the Charlotte market over the past year?
We have grown our advisory service offerings quite a bit. In the last six months, our management service offerings have been construction and property management. We have sold some important places. Our success is down to our people and the growth of our service offerings. That’s just because they’re doing a phenomenal job and caring for our clients.
How is Boundary Street Advisors changing the narrative for the region’s Black real estate developers and brokers?
We like to use a sports analogy to demonstrate what we do, which is that we play through the whistle. We can complain about fouls, about how referees are performing, about the market, the industry, or anybody. But you still have to play. You have to keep going. Our company is resilient, and we work hard to achieve positive outcomes that extend beyond mere financial success. While we may sometimes rely on others, we actively challenge the notion of simply going with the flow – we try to fight through the whistle. That’s how we’re trying to win this game.
How does the company distinguish itself from its competitors?
Our local knowledge. We have recently gone through a branding exercise, and we like ourselves. We’re a premier commercial real estate group that does work in urban infill areas. Our historical knowledge, reputation and relationships make us slightly different. A lot of the work we do now is for private equity firms. They don’t have a presence here, so they need boots on the ground. They need to know more than real estate, which we provide them. We provide them with an inside look at our region, both here in Charlotte and across the Southeast. We’ve got two offices here in Charlotte but we operate in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
What are some trends you’re observing specifically within the Charlotte market?
Industrial is trending, and office space is being used in smaller footprints. We’ve helped companies across both asset classes grow, but selectively. We also see people downsizing, shrinking and lowering their office footprints. Nobody’s sure about where office space is going today. Build-for-rent townhomes are also extremely popular. In those areas, we’ve been involved in a lot of land acquisition for rental townhomes but we’re even moving towards more for-sale products. These townhomes come from commercial land sold for residential use.
What opportunities or challenges do you see in the real estate market over the next few years?
In a city like Charlotte, we just need to be careful not to get in our own way. It’s an amiable town. Over the last 25 years, it’s been great for business. Now that I’m in real estate, I understand that it is very development-friendly and business-friendly. But we’ve got so much going on as a growing city that we can’t let our rules and regulations hinder the potential growth we can achieve. We could grow even faster if we, as a city, take time to invest in more infrastructure, talent and promote development.
How have technological advances in the real estate market changed the company’s approach, and how is it using technology to its advantage?
IT is my background. The whole goal when we got into this was to leverage our knowledge to our advantage. Agility is essential as a small business. From the outset, we made a strategic move to rely heavily on cloud applications, ensuring that vital company information remains accessible even if a laptop is lost or discarded. Software applications represent one of our largest expenses, but we leverage technology to our advantage. About two and a half years ago, when we acquired a property management firm, we promised clients the convenience of conducting all transactions online. We value personal communication, but we’ve implemented online bill payment, service request submission and quarterly report distribution. By leveraging technology in various ways, we’ve enhanced the client experience without diminishing the personalized touch. We continuously seek innovative ways to increase efficiency and gain a competitive advantage. From the start, we embraced QR codes as a differentiator.
What are Boundary Street Advisors’ top priorities and goals for the next three to five years in Charlotte?
From the beginning, we have never wanted to grow for growth’s sake. We wanted to grow with our clients and with the right people who were doing the right business. In the next three to five years, we plan to continue to do so. We have an incredible group of people, but we must continue to fulfill everybody’s professional and personal goals while maintaining our culture. We have some development opportunities that involve food insecurity. We’d like to see those come to fruition. As we take control and command of our future, we’ll get more involved in development at all levels, including on the financing side.
We also want to continue to educate. We should involve the greater African American community in commercial real estate. This can help create generational wealth. I would like to see us continue to be a region that continues to work with each other internally, looking for deals and opportunities that allow us to grow as a region. I want to see local folks do well.
