Business

Since 2006, MayfieldGentry Realty Advisors LLC, a Detroit-based institutional investment advisor, has been buying up prime commercial real estate properties in the heart of Uptown.

Mayfield

At the company’s helm is president and CEO, Chauncey Mayfield, a self-made businessman who has transformed his $15 million business into a company that has generated $1 billion in assets under management since its inception in 2003.
MGRA acquired 238,000 square feet of office space at 201 and 237 South Tryon Street in 2006 for $68.5 million and a 210,246 square foot, 17-story, Class-A office building at 200 South Tryon Street in 2007 for a reported $38 million. It is the nation’s largest African American-owned property management company and one of the largest private commercial real estate operators in North Carolina.

“My dad was a lawyer, and [he] dabbled in real estate on the side, and he always made me go to work for whatever contractor he was using for my summer job,” Mayfield explains. “I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, so it was nice and hot and humid—all the things you don’t like outside!”

After initially rebelling, Mayfield says he began embracing the work but was more curious about what took place before a project got to the construction site. As a student at Tuskegee Institute, he began taking classes off campus to get his real estate license.

He would later earn an MBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration.

Prior to MayfieldGentry, Mayfield was President and Chief Executive Officer of ShoreBank Development in Detroit, where he was responsible for the management and direction of a start-up real estate development firm. However, he found the position “confining.” So, he left in 2000 to start a real estate consulting company, and out of that venture grew the pension fund investment company with a presence in seven states currently, including North Carolina.

Mayfield gives all the credit to Chief Investment Officer Emory Matthews for MGRA’s decision to invest in the Charlotte market. He says he was skeptical about the idea, pegging Charlotte as the sleepy town he knew in the 70s and 80s. Upon visiting again, however, he says he was stunned by what had taken place here.

“I was absolutely floored,” he admits.

Citing the cost of living, quality of life, Charlotte’s location, and its ranking as the second largest financial services center in the U.S. as incentives to do business here, Mayfield says the city also continues to give MGRA “comfort” with its position as a hub for Fortune 500 companies.

“One of the things that we understand about Charlotte is that the banking industry is probably the most high profile industry in Charlotte [but] is clearly not the only industry,” he explains. “So, that in and of itself is quite significant for us. If you take the education, health care and social services sectors of the economy of Charlotte, that’s roughly about 15 percent of all the jobs in the region. If you take the Carolina Healthcare System, [it] employs roughly about 26,000 people in Charlotte alone, that’s 31 percent more than Wachovia and nearly twice as many as Bank of America.”

Mayfield says he and his partners are relying on the fact these other industries are going to remain relatively healthy. He has also assessed the city’s economic resiliency, citing that this market, notwithstanding the current crisis with the financial services sector, is expected to continue to outperform over the next few years.

“I think one benefit that we do have is that we are in eight different states in which we do investments,” he explains. “So, we are seeing the economic impact in various degrees depending on the state we’re in. One thing that is particularly impressive about Charlotte is . . . relative to other states, it isn’t experiencing economic pain.”

While he declined to speak specifically about future projects planned for this area, Mayfield said that he is a “huge believer” in North Carolina and open to other acquisition or property management opportunities in Charlotte.

“One of the things that was particularly impressive to us was that once it was announced that Wells Fargo would be taking over Wachovia, I think the Charlotte business community, particularly the Center City Partnership there, had very specific plans on how to continue to attract talent to Charlotte,” he says.     

  
Mayfield predicts that people coming to North Carolina for college will likely end up staying here and bases his assessment on projections that forecast Charlotte’s population to grow to 1.3 million by 2018.

“I think that the good news is that you’re going to have some great opportunity in Charlotte going forward,” he said.
For the long-term, Mayfield aims to make MGRA a company that is both national and international and says he has already started down that road. His more immediate goal, however, is to outdo his first six years’ success.

“The next hurdle for MayfieldGentry is to grow into a $5 billion company,” he states—a feat which he intends to accomplish over the next 2-3 years.


 

Comments