Flex Space Feasibility Study in North Carolina

A lessor class that nearly stopped

North Carolina flex space is recorded in SBA's files under nonresidential lessors, a group spanning flex, office and retail investor buildings, and the story of the class is its timing. Of the 29 loans in the FY2017 to FY2026 record, 8 came in FY2017 and 4 or 5 in each year to FY2021, but FY2024, FY2025 and FY2026 show 0. Loans to lessors of this kind nearly stop from FY2024, so the record is a picture of an earlier lending regime and should not be read as a forecast of what is available now. Total approvals reached $27.7 million gross, the median loan was $534,000 at 0.89x the benchmark for the class nationally, while the middle half ran from $325,000 to $1.4 million.

Position, mix and places

North Carolina ranks 20 of 51 for the class, and the lessor group sits at 21 of 39 in the North Carolina class ranking. Its location quotient is 0.86x. SBA 7(a) carried 28 loans and SBA 504 only 1, and franchise share is 6.9%. Mecklenburg County leads with 5 loans, Guilford follows with 4, Chowan and Wake have 3 each, Johnston and New Hanover 2 each, and Alamance, Burke, Clay and Duplin 1 each. The presence of Chowan beside Wake and Mecklenburg shows that the loans were not confined to the large metros. This cell prints no lender table.

What the code cannot separate

Flex buildings are indistinguishable in this data from office and retail lessors: banquet hall rental too sits under the same industry code. A loan counted here may be for an office or storefront building. Both outcome rates are held back because their cohorts are under the 30-loan line; the blank is not a zero and carries no number.

What a flex study has to test

A flex building is a bet on tenant mix, so the study should test the users it can attract: light industrial, showroom, service and office occupants, and the share of floor area each would take. Market rents and vacancy for comparable space in the submarket, with the lease terms tenants accept, come next, and those figures must be drawn from the market, not from this page. Construction or acquisition cost needs to be measured against a ticket near $534,000, with tenant improvements and leasing commissions carried explicitly. Coverage should appear at stabilised occupancy and again on a slow lease-up. Since the lessor lending channel has narrowed, the study should also say how the project would be financed today, because a borrower cannot assume the terms behind these older loans remain open.