When this Charlotte-based developer entered the Nashville market in 2012, many of the largest developers from its hometown were already here.
Flash forward 12 years, the competition has only grown as Proffitt Dixon Partners breaks ground on its third Nashville apartment project today.
“I love the Nashville market. The real estate side of it, it’s dizzying,” Stuart Proffitt, one of the company’s founding partners, told the Business Journal. “There's just so much going on.”
The firm has commenced work on a 345-unit apartment development in Germantown dubbed Chamberlain House.
The development will rise near the Cumberland Riverfront and Nashville Sounds Stadium, at 912 Second Ave. N., and include a pool and outdoor spa, pet park and spa, a rooftop deck, courtyards with grills and access to the greenway.
Proffit Dixon Partners recently completed Queens Wedgewood-Houston, a 221-unit development with Mercado by Butchertown on the ground level, but the firm started its Nashville expansion over a decade ago with a Germantown project.
“[Germantown] is particularly charming because of its new and historic layers. When we first started, I remember a local person saying there were some great restaurants, but it was still a little edgy for him to go out at night there. But it was obvious that that wasn’t going to be the case for long,” Proffitt said. “I didn't feel like I was really going out on a limb.”
The firm completed Payton Stakes apartments in 2016 and sold it for $78 million last year.
After the success of the firm’s first Germantown project, Proffitt Dixon Partners began looking for another land site in the neighborhood.
An opportunity presented itself when Metro put a 2.78-acre site near the riverfront up for auction. Proffitt Dixon Partners presented the winning bid, paying $32.525 million for the property in 2021, according to Metro records.
They had paid $4.5 million for its first Germantown project site in 2015.
“We closed and started drawing our architectural drawings, and then we got to a place where we thought we could start do the last push on the permitting. But it didn't feel like good timing,” Proffitt said. “We wanted to wait and see the broader economy with the interest rates spiking and then supply being so high. The hope was we’ll see construction prices improve some as the supply kind of tapers off. Now, we feel much more bullish.”
The project’s groundbreaking comes just a week after the Fed’s announcement of interest-rate cuts which is widely expected to unlock liquidity in commercial real estate financing and open the floodgates for new development.
Though competition is still high in the local real estate scene and Nashville has seen a surplus of multifamily deliveries, the Charlotte firm remains with its pedal to the medal in Music City.
By Sophia Young – Reporter, Nashville Business Journal