Commercial real estate brokers in Ridgeville, SC

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A Charlotte-based real estate developer has revealed the next phase of a large mixed-use park in Ridgeville.

Childress Klein, the project’s developer, and Altus Equity Group Inc., a real estate sponsor, operator and investment company, said the finalization of securing an $86.5 million loan needed for construction of their industrial project located in the Camp Hall Commerce Park has been arranged with New York Life Real Estate Investors, according to an Altus Equity Group Inc news release.

This is said to be one of the largest historical spec build industrial projects within Charleston proper with the Camp Hall Commerce Park Campus 8, the next phase of the larger Camp Hall mixed-use park, equaling more than 1.4 million square feet, according to the release.

“While construction started in June of last year, we are pleased to announce the closing of our financing for this project,” said Matt Harper, partner at Childress Klein. “Despite some headwinds in the capital markets, we were able to secure attractive financing through New York Life Real Estate Investors and look forward to working with them to complete construction in the second half of this year.”

Camp Hall has been ranked by “Business Facilities Magazine’s” annual rankings as the No. 7 best industrial park in the nation in 2022 – and the only industrial park to make the list in the Southeast. Moreover, the project’s access to Interstate 26 provides convenient connection to the logistics and distribution capabilities of the Charleston market, including the Port of Charleston and Charleston International Airport, the release said.

“We are extremely excited about this project,” said Andrew Eicher, Altus Equity senior vice president. “Charleston is a strong economic center with growing industrial demand from manufacturing, logistics, and the continued growth of the Port of Charleston. There are many complications in a deal of this size, and we appreciate the attentiveness of the local and state governments to the project. In addition to our trusted local industry relationships, Camp Hall and Santee Cooper were instrumental in working through challenges as they arose during the pre-construction phases.”

Construction started in June upon purchase of the land, which was facilitated by Cushman and Wakefield’s Charleston Office. The Charleston office of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc has been selected as the leasing broker for the project by the combined management team, the release said.

Childress Klein has developed more than 51 million square feet of commercial real estate and owns assets valued at more than $3 billion.

“We continue to see opportunities in construction lending and look forward towards solidifying and expanding our relationships with top tier sponsors such as Childress Klein and Altus," said Elizabeth Roy, New York Life Real Estate Investors’ Structured Debt Team senior director.

RIDGEVILLE, S.C. (WCBD)- Researchers have confirmed the discovery of fossils belonging to a 24-million-year-old whale in Dorchester County.

The newly discovered bones belonged to Eomysticetus, an extinct ancestor of baleen whales, according to experts. A team from Palmetto Fossil Excursions unearthed the fossils earlier this month along the Chandler Bridge formation near Ridgeville.

“It was extremely exciting knowing how rare Eomysticetes are and knowing that’s what we were pulling out of the ground,” Founder Skye Basak said.

Basak and Thomas Gilpin first located the posterior end of the Eomysticete’s skull around 6:00 p.m. on March 29.

The following day, Basak and Gilpin were joined by Joshua Basak, Dr. Elizabeth Kane, David Ryan, Ken Pullen, Mike Bona, and Dr. Robert Boessenecker to continue the excavation process.

By nightfall, the team had expanded the hole to nearly 25 feet wide and 10 feet deep and discovered several more bones—one lower mandible, the sternum, 10 vertebrae, including the atlas, multiple ribs, a flipper bone, and multiple throat bones.

“That’s all that we were able to locate in the bottom of the hole as of last week, but the hole needs to be expanded…so we can look for the rest of the animal,” Basak said.

The lower mandible was finally freed from the hole by about 9:30 p.m. on March 31 and a few hours later the 6-foot-long, 2,000-pound block containing the skull was also freed, according to Basak.

Dr. Boessenecker, a research fellow at the College of Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History and one of the world’s leading experts on Eomysticetes, called the specimen a rare find as less than 20 complete skulls exist worldwide.

“It is likely to be more complete than the original specimen of Eomysticetus that was discovered in the 1970s,” he explained. “The more complete a fossil is, the more you can tell about its functional anatomy and how it may have behaved in life.”

Eomysticetes were the largest living whales during the Oligocene Epoch which dates back about 33.9 million to 23 million years ago, according to the American Museum of Natural History. They are believed to have been between 25 and 35 feet long, which is much smaller than modern baleen whales.

Researchers also believe that while the whales may have already had baleen, a filter-feeding system, which allowed them to eat zooplankton. There is also evidence to suggest that Eomysticetes may have also had a few residual teeth, according to experts.

Remains of the extinct whales have primarily been found in South Carolina, New Zealand, Japan, Washington, and Oregon. But, Dr. Boessenecker said the first named specimen of Eomysticetus was discovered in Ladson.

“There’s some isotopic evidence that they perhaps underwent seasonal migration,” he said.

After experiencing machinery-related setbacks, Basak said she hopes the team will continue the excavation efforts in the coming weeks.

“Knowing what this specimen will do for science is kind of mind-blowing, especially if we’re able to locate the rest of the animal and bring it to a point where it’s the most complete specimen of its kind,” she continued.

If you find a fossil in the ground or on the beach in the Charleston area, you can reach out to the Mace Brown Museum for identification.

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By Christmas, Redwood Materials, a producer and recycler of anode and cathode battery components for electric vehicles, expects to be operating out of its 600-acre site at Camp Hall Commerce Park in Ridgeville.

“We are very much ‘building the plane as we fly it,’ which means building smaller buildings, getting production up and going while we're building other multimillion square foot (sized) facilities so we can scale and grow into those,” said Alexis Georgeson, vice president of communications and government relations for Redwood Materials at a Feb. 15 breakfast hosted by the Berkeley County Chamber of Commerce.

In late 2022, Nevada-based Redwood Materials — founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel —announced its $3.5 billion investment to establish operations in Berkeley County, marking the largest economic development announcement in the history of South Carolina. The company expects to create 1,500 new jobs over the next 10 years.

“Research and development a big part of our focus and there will be a lot of that happening at the Berkeley campus. We hope to be working very closely with ReadySC on a lot of worker training,” Georgeson told a packed house at the South Carolina Aeronautical Training Center at Trident Technical College.

Redwood Materials, created in 2017, is the first company in the world that recycles used electric vehicle batteries and other types of batteries to extract crucial components that can then be sent to car manufacturers to be put into new electric vehicle batteries. Currently, those components exclusively come from Asia.

“Our business model is a little bit different than some other battery recyclers (in that) they're not going further downstream and doing the refining. Unless you're going further into the refining process, you're actually having to export the material and relying on another country to refine it for you,” Georgeson said. “We feel the pressure every single day to get up and going as quickly as possible and be able to feed (automakers) these components domestically. They don't have any plans other than to send $150 billion overseas to Asia right now to source these components.”

Redwood Materials works with auto dismantlers to source used and end-of-life electric vehicle batteries, either when a car reaches the end of its life or was crashed and no longer drivable, Georgeson said.

“Until now, (dismantlers) haven't had a downstream plan for these batteries. They've pretty much been just storing them and waiting for someone like Redwood to come along and take these batteries off their hands,” Georgeson said. “We go into the field, we send our own fleet of trucks and collect these thousand-pound batteries safely, package them and transport them.”

One of Redwood Materials’ largest customers is Panasonic, which manufactures Tesla electric vehicles at Tesla’s gigafactory. Panasonic will be sourcing both anode and cathode battery components from Redwood.

“The beauty of these (components) is that they can be infinitely recycled,” Georgeson said. “At a certain point where our population starts (swapping) an internal combustion engine for an electric vehicle — and if you believe that at some point, we will all be driving electric vehicles — we can hit a plateau where we’re recycling one vehicle to create a new vehicle and we’re no longer having to mine these materials (from the Earth). That's really a future that we firmly believe is not too far off.”

Georgeson said Redwood Materials is continuously looking to streamline operations and open up new recycling avenues and opportunities—including a direct consumer recycling program for household electronics.

“We send graphite recovered in our mining process downstream for industrial lubrication. We’ve got gypsum as part of our downstream product and we send that to drywall manufacturers,” Georgeson said. “Everything that's recovered in the process is reused or sent to another partner that needs it in their process. In terms of rail and trucking, we anticipate using rail very heavily on the (Camp Hall) site.”

Since recycling is the hallmark of the company, the Berkeley County facility will use renewable energy to power its operations and water used in its hydro operations will be continuously recycled.

“Our facility in Nevada, as well as the one in Berkeley County, will use one hundred percent renewable energy and have no wastewater,” Georgeson said. “Our Nevada facility took twelve months from breaking ground to products coming out of the facility. We move fast. The ability to get going on the Camp Hall site very quickly was a critical factor for us, as well as being located in a great central downtown where we knew we'd be able to recruit and retain talent.”

RIDGEVILLE, S.C. (WCIV) — Phase two of construction of the Campus 4 in Camp Hall Commerce Park is underway.

The second phase involves the construction of a 1,123,360-sq-ft industrial facility on 110.6 acres of land.

“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made on Phase I of this project, and our team is excited to carry that momentum through to Phase II. Camp Hall is an expertly planned, best-in-class park, and we’re honored to be involved in the full development of Campus 4," said Keith Horton, senior project manager at Frampton Construction.

Read More: Clyburn: $25M in federal funding for new railway tracks to support Camp Hall Commerce Park

The Camp Hall project was designed and promoted by Santee Cooper in partnership with the South Carolina Department of Commerce, Berkeley County, Edisto and Berkeley Electric Cooperatives, the South Carolina Power Team, the Charleston Regional Development Alliance, and the South Carolina Ports Authority.

“The full development of Campus 4 at Camp Hall Commerce Park gives Portman Industrial a substantial land position with state-of-the-art logistics facilities in the highly constrained Charleston market. Campus 4 provides us with the ability to target a diversity of tenants desiring smaller, single-load facilities that have been the hallmark of Charleston’s tenant demand,” says John Gaskin. “Campus 4 also fills a void in immediate supply of cross-dock logistics facilities of +/- 500,000 square feet and +1,000,000 square feet, which are in short supply in Charleston and desired by present and future port customers.”

Frampton Construction Company, LLC. is leading the construction project.

Read More: McMaster touts new Volvo Car University, electric vehicle investment in Ridgeville

Phase one of the Campus 4 construction is still underway. It includes three industrial facilities with a combined 940,000-sq-ft. That phase is over 60% leased at this time.

Last June, nearly two dozen miles of new railway track were given federal funding to the tune of $25 million.

The money was slated for the South Carolina Department of Commerce's Palmetto Railways division to construct approximately 22.7 miles of new track and related facilities. This will connect the Camp Hall Commerce Park in Ridgeville to the CSX multi-state rail network.

Google has confirmed it is behind a data center development project in Ridgeville, South Carolina

The search and cloud company has also received permission to develop three more data centers in Belgium.

Google confirmed to expand in South Carolina

Google has revealed itself to be behind the Project Dawson data center proposals in South Carolina.

“The Dorchester County Economic Development (DCED) office, which serves to support economic growth in the county, confirms a relationship with Google who recently closed on property in the county,” the DCED said this week.

“We are thrilled to welcome Google to Dorchester County and know they will be a long-term partner for our community, especially our schools,” said Dorchester County Council Chairman Todd Friddle. “Google has a history of strengthening local workforces and uplifting communities, and we look forward to Google making a positive difference here in Dorchester County.”

Campus specifications or project timelines haven't been shared.

According to the Post and Courier, the company aims to invest $510 million in the new campus – a 231-acre site along Research Center Drive and Highway 17A in Dorchester County’s Pine Hill Business Campus. The Dorchester County Council voted to change the site’s zoning earlier this month.

Google – previously reported as the company likely involved – has previously been conducting business around the project behind the Autumn Timber LLC and Mallard LLC company names. The search company had been referring to the site as Project Dawson.

“We have been proud to call South Carolina home for over fifteen years since we first put down roots in Berkeley County,” Google said in a statement. “Since then, we have partnered closely with local leadership, schools, and nonprofits to lift up the great work happening here. As we look to expand in the state, we have acquired property in Dorchester County for the development of a new data center campus. We look forward to growing our community here in South Carolina and will share details as this long-term project progresses.”

Google currently operates a South Carolina data center campus in Moncks Corner, around 20 miles east of Ridgeville. The company recently acquired another 140 acres in the area.

The Post and Courier also reports that Google, going by the aliases Project Evergreen and Gannett Enterprises LLC, has also is purchasing 206 acres for a proposed third data center near the county's Winding Woods Commerce Park along Pecan Tree Road and Highway 78, outside the town of St. George. The company was granted a $5.55 million purchase option for the land this month.

However, the company reportedly aims to focus on the Pine Hill campus for now, and will expand to the Winding Woods site as demand requires.

Google expands in Belgium

In Belgium, Google has been granted permission for a new data center campus.

The Walloon Region has issued an urban planning permit to the company for the construction of a new data center campus in the Hainaut municipality of Farciennes. The company is reportedly investing €600 million ($646m) in the project.

“The Walloon Region has just granted the permit for the installation of Google in Farcienne,” said Hugues Bayet, mayor of the municipality of Farciennes. “A new step in the realization of the digital giant's welcome in our region and above all the net creation of many jobs!”

Plans for the camps were first announced in July 2023. The campus will span some 53,000 sqm (570,500 sq ft). Previous reports suggested work would begin on the first phase – spanning around 7,500 sqm (80,730 sq ft) – would begin last year and launch in 2025.

More recent press suggests groundbreaking for the first 80MW phase is due to happen later this year.

Google acquired 53 hectares of land in the Ecopôle eco-business park, located across the municipalities of Farciennes, Aiseau-Presles, and Sambreville, in 2019. According to previous reports, energy firm Elia has confirmed that 200-300MW of capacity would be available on the site.

Belgium’s Saint Ghislain was the site of Google’s first data center in Europe. The company has built five data centers at its 90-hectare Saint-Ghislain site since 2009 as well as a solar plant. The company uses the shell company Crystal Computing for much of its dealings in Belgium.

2022 also saw Google acquire a 36-hectare site located in Ecaussinnes, in Hainaut province, in the Feluy industrial zone near La Louvière.

According to Raphael Stokis, a delegated official of the Walloon Region, the conditions attached to the permit will require on-site solar panels. Additionally, 90 percent of the energy consumed on the site must be carbon-free by 2025 and this must even be 95 percent by 2030.

Google will also have to opt for a more sustainable cooling system for the data centers in future – reportedly switching from systems that use water-consuming technology to air-cooling.