7/26/21 South Carolina Mastermind Group Meeting

South Carolina July 2021 – Key Take Aways

• Laura Ullrich with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond led off the roundtable advising that their employees will be back in the office (but only 2 days a week) starting in October; interestingly, they also have some employees that have been hired to reside outside of their regional market. SC ended unemployment benefits and though it was expected to help aid in getting more people back to work, hiring employees remains very challenging. Laura also commented on the migration data for 2020 – SC seeing almost 60K new residents, as compared to almost 84K in NC (the comparison is that NC is twice the size as SC). From a labor force perspective, SC is up 24k jobs while NC is down 130k. Lastly, Laura reported that the fastest growing county in the state is Jasper County. • NAI Earle Furman’s Keith Jones reports that the office market has been rebounding nicely in the 2nd quarter of 2021, particularly in the CBD. The suburban market has challenges, especially in the call center environments that have remain closed; ironically, even if they did want to reopen, they are having significant issues hiring people (many moved into higher paying manufacturing jobs). He also reports there are a number of small office requests, but there is no new construction on the horizon as pricing is simply too high. • Also from Earle Furman, land broker Michael Roth says the biggest challenge is the lack of available land for development, especially for single family and multi-family development. • Davis Lewis of Context Design is working on a 200k square foot project in Columbia (along with fellow Member, Pattillo Construction) for a Chinese company. Their biggest challenge right now is with materials pricing and timing and major supply chain issues. • Tax Credit Marketplace’s Josh Workman and Andrew Porio recently attended a conference of the 270+ municipalities in the state of SC, including mayors and city managers and got some great insights into various cities and regions and their push for redevelopment and growth; investor demand remains high. They are continuing to work with the abandoned building tax credits and seeing multi-family, office and brewery projects among others. Josh reported the state will be receiving roughly $2.5B in federal funds, with $435M of that earmarked for municipalities, but the state has been slow to go get those funds. One big topic at the conference was how to activate Main Street to achieve ‘Main Street Envy’ – the thought is to not just attract the ‘dreamers’ but to invest in local residents who are visionaries. • Gallagher’s Beau Long and Will Giambalvo commented that rate for almost all coverages are going up, especially within E&O and cyber sectors. Of particular note, there has been a lot of activity for errors and omissions relating to construction management and delays in materials impacting delivery dates. • Susan Donkers with Global Location Strategies was unable to attend but reports many site selection projects in the electric vehicle supply chain from the lithium mining to all types of battery production and then extending into battery recycling. They are also seeing an uptick in requests for location benchmarking, both globally and domestically in the USA, for firms who want to consider where they ought to place new capacity. The release of the Site Shepherd software and the improvements we have made to our Location Benchmarking order form are facilitating us to conduct more of these requests with a faster turn-around time. Food & beverage projects and warehouse & distribution projects continue to be requesting location strategy and site selection services. They are also preparing for the release of a software integration to Site Shepherd called Lasso, a data collection app.