It took some persuasion, but Spectrum Cos. was able to secure top-shelf office tenants for its Vantage South End project in Charlotte, North Carolina. The developer's success earned it the 2023 CoStar Impact Award for commercial development of the year in the market, as judged by a panel of local industry professionals.
Spectrum and equity partner, Invesco, opened the second of the two-building Vantage South End last year. Each 11-story tower is connected by a parking garage, and they share a boutique hotel and a 1-acre park. Vantage South End is a two-minute walk to a stop on Charlotte's light-rail network.
Charlotte's South End is one of only two markets in the United States to have doubled its high-end office space over the past five years, according to CoStar data.
Vantage South End is at the leading edge of this trend, according to local real estate experts. When construction on the West Tower started in 2019, few corporate office tenants had moved into the South End area, just across Interstate 277 from the core of Midtown Charlotte.
But LendingTree's decision to locate its headquarters on six floors of the West Tower did the trick. LendingTree has the building's signage rights.
In the East Tower, Hartford Insurance has already occupied the top two floors, and broadband provider Brightspeed has moved in, too. Law firms Alston & Bird and Holland & Knight are set to move in this spring.
About the project: Vantage South End is a two-tower development with offices, a hotel and retail. Located just southwest of Interstate 277, the buildings mark the first major commercial development between Charlotte's Center City and the emerging residential and commercial South End district.
What the judges said: Vantage South End deployed "creative ways of combining different types of spaces and adapted to changing office needs," said Yongqiang Chu, director of the Childress Klein Center for Real Estate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The project is a "visually impactful development that acts as a gateway to South End," said Chris Skibinski, managing director and principal at Avison Young.
"It's the largest and most important development to happen in Charlotte in recent years," said Joe Franco, senior vice president at CBRE.
They made it happen: Dillard Williams, Jason Fish and Virginia Luther at Spectrum Cos.
