Midtown commercial buildings sold to Charlotte company

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Four transactions totaling more than $14 million in downtown Charleston have moved 31,635 square feet of retail and office space to a Charlotte investment firm.

Asana Partners paid $14.4 million for three buildings and a portion of a fourth in the deal that closed Aug. 1. The properties were owned by Regent Partners LLC of Atlanta and GEM Realty Capital of Chicago.

Regent/BN Charleston Holdings LLC, which includes local developers Robert L. Clement III and Stuart Coleman, were minority equity partners in the deal. Clement said the investment group came together in 2003, five years before the Great Recession.

“If you had told me when we first assembled Midtown that by the time it was built we would have recapitalized the project three times, I don’t think I would have believed you,” Clement said in a news release. “Recruiting new equity partners during periods of extreme uncertainty in the market was probably the hardest, most challenging aspect of the redevelopment of Midtown.”

Coleman said that recapitalization of the property was the biggest piece of the puzzle but not the only challenge that the Midtown development faced.

"We had environmental remediation issues and construction challenges," Coleman said. "We had to get through a rezoning and the Board of Architectural Review. Yet bringing new capital investment to Charleston again and again was what made this project such a huge success from a development standpoint.”

The four parts of the sale included:

·      550 King St., a four-story, new building.

·      562 King St., a two-story, new building.

·      564 King St., an unoccupied historic structure.

·      570 King St., ground floor of the hotel underneath the ballroom.