7/21/22 Hampton Roads Mastermind Group Meeting

Hampton Roads July 2022 – Key Take-Aways

• Kevin Hughes – guest speaker
  • The City of Suffolk at 430 square miles is the largest geographic city in the commonwealth.
    • Growing a city of this size requires a robust and focused development plan.
    • Currently we have two large development corridors for the city: one in North Suffolk, and one more central.
  • Current population is 96,000…we expect to be 100,000 in three years.
  • Industry sectors (warehousing and distribution), play a big role in our city.
    • Began preparing for this in 2008 and 2009.
    • A lot of farm tracks rezoned to support this.
  • 11% growth in population.  We need more people in the overall Hampton Roads area.
    • Census to census Suffolk and Chesapeake lead in growth.
  • $74,000 is the median household income in Suffolk, a little bit higher than the commonwealth average.
  • Industrial development and overall presence is strong in the city.
    • Planters Peanuts, Lipton, Pepsi, Amazon, etc.
    • (Lipton)…every teabag in North America comes out of Suffolk VA.
  • Mixed use development is also a key player for the city along with industrial.
  • Downtown development is underway in line with a masterplan that was developed a couple of years ago.
    • Marketing, new grant programs for retail and restaurants have pushed this forward.
    • New public library doubles the size of the last one.
    • New festival event marketplace in the center of downtown, hopefully to fully open next summer.
  • Massimo Zanetti Beverage, significant player in the world of coffee, third largest coffee roaster in North America is housed in Suffolk VA.

  Richard Crouch – Vandeventer Black

  • The last two years there has been an inability to hire people, however that is recently changing.
  • Interest rates have slowed down acquisitions.
  • Doing a lot more business development, post closure, etc.

  Dan Shelton – Whiting-Turner

  • Lots of healthcare work is still happening and doesn’t seem to be letting up.
  • Long lead times on anything electrical for building needs.  Lead time for roofing materials has also been long, but we have developed work arounds.
  • Structural steel has not gotten worse, but it has also not gotten better.

  Craig Cope – Harvey Lindsay Commercial Real Estate

  • Rental rates are approaching “13 triple net.”

  Dave France – Kimley Horn

  • We personally have hired over 1000 new people since last year.
  • Private sector is growing rapidly but the public sector is growing considerably slower.

  Carter Wilcox – Mumford Company

  • Virginia Beach and Norfolk were the strongest hotel markets in the country during the pandemic.
    • Recovered the quickest
    • Performed the best
  • As well as the hotel market is doing, it is slowing down.   The pandemic created a large amount of pent-up travel demand, making vacation destinations in driving distance more appealing.  Now things are leveling out to normal levels.
  • Extended Stay style hotels were the best performing hotel sector 2020 and 2021.

  Keith Slattum – Dollar Bank

  • In the banking world it has been a challenge to hire people.
    • Our branches close from 12:45 to 1:30 to allow for lunch because we don’t have people to cover.
  • PPP loan dollars will now start trickling in.
    • Most recipients of PPP loans held on to the money until they were forgiven.  Now that this has happened, money will be available to budget for spending.
  • On commercial Real Estate, the last 3 deals I have seen had 24% equity going into the deal.

  Kelly Martone – Bellwether Enterprise Real Estate Capital

  • We did 12 billion in business last year and are already in 12 billion for this year.
  • Multifamily, industrial, and self-storage still very popular for us.

  Ben Anderson – Colliers

  • We have well over 200 tenants looking for 15 million square feet of space in our market.
  • There is really no space for tenants at the moment which is limiting leasing activity.
  • Industrial is still very strong here even though it is slowing down on a national scale.

  Fouad Mohit – All Trades Global

  • The market of business brokerage is changing like everything else.
  • Small business is not performing as well as they used to.
  • Big boxes that have several tenants aren’t performing as well.
  • Car dealers that at one point were expanding and buying more dealerships now can’t get enough cars so they don’t have a need for the space.
    • 30 or 40 years ago you used to have to order your car, we are going back to that.