Articles
NRG Enters the
North Carolina Market
Charlotte, NC (June, 2007) - The management team at Neighborhood Revitalization Group (NRG) is pursuing a bold mission: to infuse new life into distressed properties to make them focal points for the community. The group of like-minded professionals has been reinvigorating similar neighborhood projects primarily in California for over a decade. All told, they have worked on more than 300 commercial real estate projects throughout the U.S. They decided to pool their resources to focus on high-density neighborhoods that working-class families are moving into.
“We have a commitment to bring quality to neighborhoods with large concentrations of working-class families, areas that are growing such as Charlotte, North Carolina,” said NRG president James Sharples, a structural engineer with an MBA in entrepreneurial and strategic management from the Wharton School of Business. “The seeds of a growing population are there and soon high-end grocery stores and other retailers catering to this burgeoning population will take root in Charlotte’s neighborhoods as they have in Los Angeles today”, he said.
During the past two years, NRG has been focusing on secondary urban markets in the Southeastern U.S. (like Charlotte), which are experiencing dramatic growth in working-class residents.
The business model for this unique commercial development and property-management firm is to acquire properties, ideally in government identified “empowerment zones”, and refurbish them, thus attracting both working-class customers and locally owned and operated businesses to the renovated shopping plazas. “We prefer local flavor and local entrepreneurs,” Mr. Sharples said. “We are active in transforming the centers and making a difference in the community, while also earning a meaningful return on our investment,” he said.
In June, NRG purchased a sizable shopping plaza –approximately 80,000 square feet with 15 retail tenants in northeast Charlotte. “We’re in the process of adding some polish—it was in dire need of hands-on management,” he added. The real estate group also plans to add to the plaza another 5,500 square feet to accommodate a restaurant that will bring in additional traffic. Sharples will be overseeing that construction. In Chicago, he served as a lead member in the design and construction management of projects totaling more than $1.3 billion.
Helping to lead NRG’s efforts is Mark Nierman, who has more than 30 years of experience in commercial real estate development throughout the U.S. He is primarily responsible for project selection and tenant procurement. Like his colleague, Mr. Nierman is impressed by the rapid growth of neighborhoods in Charlotte; “it reminds me of Los Angeles twenty years ago,” he states.
NRG recently made a clear commitment to this market by bringing Mildred Hernández on board to manage its properties in North Carolina. She had previously supervised real estate operations for Banco Popular in Central Florida and has ample experience interacting with the tenants and clients NRG wants to attract. “The working-class population in Charlotte and other surrounding areas in North Carolina is growing very rapidly and NRG fills a void in the community by making retail space available to local business owners,” she said. “We are here to lend a hand and be part of their success.”
With their team in place,
NRG will continue to look for properties
and opportunities in areas they’ve
identified as having a strong demographic
alignment with their mission. “We
continue to be bullish on the Southeastern
U.S. and we’re very encouraged
by the potential we see for us to
deepen our impact in communities there,”
stated Mr. Sharples.
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