A Nashville developer with ties to former NFL star quarterback Peyton Manning that has helped reshape urban areas in the Tennessee capital is expanding into build-to-rent projects, starting in a fast-growth Southeast region.
AJ Capital Partners, known for developing Graduate Hotels in U.S. college towns, has launched Outpost Residential to build rental homes around the country. It already has started construction on 247 homes in Foley, Alabama, about half an hour from the Gulf of Mexico. Called Outpost Orchard, the rental neighborhood is being developed on the site of a former pecan orchard.
Foley is in Baldwin County next to Mobile, Alabama. The county has been one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. Much of the population growth has been in Fairhope, Daphne, Foley and the beach areas.
AJ Capital Partners, which has Manning’s older brother Cooper Manning as a senior managing director of investor relations, said Outpost has bought land in Savannah, Georgia; North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Austin, Texas, for future development. But it also plans to expand to Tampa, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; and Nashville, Tennessee.
The developer has been investing in federal opportunity zones, which allow investors to defer capital gains taxes, in Nashville, New Orleans, Miami and Waco, Texas, and Portland, Oregon. In Nashville, AJ Capital Partners has been heavily involved in transforming the city’s Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, an old industrial area about three miles south of downtown Nashville, into a popular area that includes residential, retail and officer space.
It moved its headquarters from Chicago nearly three years ago into Nashville's former May Hosiery Mills complex the firm redeveloped. AJ Capital Partners also built Nashville Warehouse Co., a timber-construction office building and an entertainment venue.
The developer, however, has reached outside of Nashville’s opportunity zone with a proposal about six miles west of downtown Nashville to transform a shopping center Belle Meade Plaza into towers that have multifamily, hotel and retail.