REBIC – Charlotte Commercial Real Estate – 2026 Economic Outlook Speculates on Growth, Data Centers, Tariffs, Labor Trends and More.

From REBIC - 3/24/26

Taken from the Charlotte Business Journal. Published 2.27.2026

Despite tariffs, persistent inflation worries and a challenged labor market, Charlotte continues to outpace its peers, with some of the strongest evidence coming in the commercial real estate market.

“Charlotte is now punching above its weight,” says Tracy Dodson, COO of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, the group tasked with recruiting business to the 15-county region. “When we’re competing on office deals, we’re now competing against Atlanta and Dallas. It’s a different conversation than it was four or five years ago.”

That’s because Charlotte delivered and absorbed more new class A office space since 2022 than any other city in the nation.

Dodson made her points about the strength of the Charlotte region at a lunch conversation hosted by Fifth Third Bank and presented by the Charlotte Business Journal. Joining Dodson in the conversation were Joe Perkins, COO of Carolina Handling, Glenn Sherrill, chairman and CEO of SteelFab Inc., Brett Gray, senior managing director and Charlotte market leader for CBRE, who also oversees the Carolinas and Tennessee, Lee Fite, president of Carolinas region for Fifth Third, Jeff Korzenik, Fifth Third’s chief economist, and Steve Englehart, senior vice president of commercial banking at Fifth Third. Publisher T.J. McCullough moderated the conversation.

On population growth and economic expansion

It’s become a common refrain in Charlotte to quantify the region’s rapid growth with the data that on average 157 newcomers move to the Charlotte region every single day. Dodson says a full 2/3rds of those new residents are of prime working age and 80% have college degrees.

Most new residents come from New York City, followed by Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and a newer trend of people from southern California.

“What we hear from a lot from people coming from the northeast or the west coast is that life is just easier here than in these bigger metropolitan markets,” Dodson says.

Such momentum of newcomers to Charlotte is driven in large part by the businesses that are moving or expanding here. Charlotte’s office market continues to out-perform expectations. A flurry of leasing activity in 2025 out-performed other cities. Most of the new office inventory is in places like South End, which command some of the city’s highest rental rates.

We continued to add space to the market without taking much offline,” said Gray of CBRE. “Charlotte delivered more new product than any other market in the country in 2021, and we have leased effectively all of it to date. We’re now seeing older, functionally obsolete buildings being repositioned for alternative uses, which is helping rebalance the supply.” Vacancy rates for prime office space stand at about 10.5% and overall vacancy was roughly 25% at the end of the fourth quarter.

Gray expects that at least one new speculative office building could be announced in 2026 by a developer with a strong balance sheet, but he says financing continues to be a challenge for most developers.

“We are tracking 2.5 million square feet of users right now that are looking at Charlotte,” Gray says.

Dodson says the size of office users she’s talking to has grown.

“These are not small office deals anymore; everything is a thousand employees,” Dodson says. “The 100 employee deals are just coming. There’s not an incentive discussion.”

Office rents have soared in recent years with many buildings opening since 2022 generating rents that are effectively double what was once considered normal class A rent in the city.

On tariffs affecting business operations

President Trump has levied tariffs on a host of different products since his Liberation Day announcements in April 2025. For some manufacturers, the tariff effect has been more dramatic of late.

“The tariffs were slow to have an impact, but they have had an impact,” says Sherrill, whose company, SteelFab, fabricates and erects structural steel for large commercial buildings.

Since June, the price of structural steel has gone up about 23%, with the bulk of that increase coming in the new year, Sherrill says.

In addition, the time it takes to order steel and have it delivered to our plants has doubled from 6 weeks to more than 14 weeks in the last few months.

Sherrill says some of the lag in getting product is caused by the explosion of demand for AI data centers and not so much the tariffs.

“The AI data center boom is like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Sherrill says. “I’ve been doing this for 33 years and we’ve never seen a 100,000-ton project, and there are three of them out there right now.”

Sherrill said he anticipates steel prices will continue to rise.

Perkins says his customers in the industrial and distribution center industries are willing to invest in automation and the assorted hardware they need to achieve automation because of the gains they can get in productivity, even with higher prices from tariffs.

“We still see the tariff surcharge that comes to us for every quote we get, whether it’s for racking, automated systems, or robots, relative to where it’s coming from, but I think customers are just ready to move on,” Perkins says.

Englehart of Fifth Third Bank agrees that business leaders are no longer paralyzed by the tariffs and have decided to move ahead with business decisions rather than trying to out-maneuver the higher costs they are paying.

“After about July, I don’t know if people were just fed up with it and said they needed to grow. We saw requests for capital expenditure financing and folks looking for new buildings become very active in the back half of the year,” Englehart says.

On AI data centers

AI adoption in the workplace continues to animate business decisions. For Sherrill at SteelFab, construction of the giant data centers is driving business decisions.

Not long ago, Sherrill says Meta, AWS, Google and Microsoft were the main companies building data centers. Since then, those large tech companies have turned the task over to developers. And while those developers would like to satisfy huge demand for data center space, they are hitting up against a major infrastructure shortage that threatens to slow development.

“There’s absolutely not enough infrastructure or power to fuel these data centers,” Sherrill says.

In North Carolina, Sherrill says data center developers have requested from utilities 30 gigawatts of power. For context, 1GW powers about 1 million homes.

Duke Energy is planning to build five new combined-cycle natural gas plants in the Carolinas by 2033. But Sherrill says that new capacity still won’t come near to meeting the power demand for data centers.

That’s why Microsoft made a deal to help restart the closed Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and will purchase all of the electricity from the plant.

“I think the power issue will slow the data center market down before some sort of technology disruptor,” Sherrill says.

Korzenik, Fifth Third’s chief economist, says he believes the difficult political issue of rising energy prices for everyone else will also slow data center development.

Ultimately, Sherrill says he expects the solution will be for private equity firms to fund small nuclear power plants that are operated for the data centers by the utilities.

On labor trends

Despite the challenges of tariffs and inflation, business leaders say they see some positive trends within their business.

Perkins says customers want more data on which to base decisions and that’s driving investments in automation.

“Prior to Covid, automation was not in the budget or was an afterthought. Companies said they could get it done through brute force,” Perkins says. “Now with the cost of labor, customers are recognizing they have to meet customer demand and need to act now.”

As Amazon, Walmart and others deliver products quickly, smaller retailers need to satisfy that same expectation for short delivery windows.

“It’s exciting that customers are finally to the point where they recognize automation can solve a lot of those challenges,” he says.

Because of the demand, Carolina Handling intends to increase its workforce to 1,500 employees in the next five years.

“Trades have become cool again,” Perkins says. Carolina Handling is working with high schools and community colleges, teaching classes and offering scholarships to bring in employees, and it’s working.

Korzenik agrees that the culture around working in trades is changing as American manufacturing grows. He says employers need to recognize that they need to be involved in workforce development, whereas in the past they may have relied upon colleges to deliver to them trained workers.

“We at Fifth Third are big proponents of American manufacturing and are absolute believers that there’s a much brighter future ahead that it can be a bigger part of the economy,” Korzenik says.

Sherrill says his business experiences a 30% employee attrition rate each year, which equates to the need to hire 100 new employees a year at its Charlotte plant. He says the business has more success hiring from the community college than recruiting directly from high schools.

Conversely, Sherrill says SteelFab has hired 35 immigrants from Vietnam in recent years and 33 of them remain with the company, a far greater retention rate than native-born employees.

“Unfortunately, there’s not enough young people coming out of CPCC that want to work with their hands to fill that gap,” Sherrill says. “The immigration policies absolutely have to be changed or else we are going to have a huge worker shortage.”

SteelFab offers full training to employees and starting wages have risen from $14 an hour in 2019 to $22.50 an hour today. Within three years, most plant employees are making $70k a year.

On optimism and fear in 2026

Charlotte’s strong commercial real estate market and continued interest among prospect companies to move to Charlotte fuels optimism for Dodson of CRBA.

Her bigger concern is how Charlotte remains an affordable market for newcomers, including the cost of housing.

Perkins says he’s optimistic about manufacturers reshoring businesses and industrial space being absorbed.

“Scout Motors is coming. Red Bull is coming. There are a lot of big names that have come to this market and are looking to make Charlotte home,” Perkins says.

Englehart says the strong tailwinds of the Charlotte region’s economy make for strong business conditions for Fifth Third Bank.

“The concern is all of the volatility around manufacturing and input costs,” Englehart says. “Those things that are uncontrollable give me pause.”

Gray says he’s optimistic about Charlotte’s growing reputation as a business-friendly market, but emphasizes that the region must continue keeping pace with key infrastructure and community-wide needs. That includes water and sewer capacity, an issue already constraining growth in some surrounding counties, as well as maintaining strong school systems, supporting workforce and talent development and monitoring public safety as part of the broader set of factories companies evaluate when choosing where to grow.

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather live than Charlotte,” Gray says, “but we have to keep up with all of these fundamentals so we can continue putting our best foot forward.”

Sherrill says he’s optimistic about opportunities for his business building data centers, healthcare facilities, higher education and manufacturing projects.

“We’ve got the biggest pipeline of work that we have ever had,” Sherrill says.

What concerns him is the likelihood of higher inflation in a few years, especially if President Trump is able to pressure a newly appointed Fed chair to prematurely lower interest rates in the short-term during the remainder of Trump’s term.

“That would fuel the economy and then four or five years from now inflation could be so out of control that the Fed chair will be forced to take rates to much higher numbers and we are mired in this multi-year recession,” Sherrill says.

Fite, Fifth Third’s Charlotte market leader, says he’s bullish on the economy and the region and believes interest rates are likely to go up in the mid-term and much higher interest rates and inflation in a few years.

“Locally, I want us to not lose sight of what made this such an attractive market,” Fite says. “The level of cooperation for the long-term needs to be a priority.”

Economic outlook

The luncheon started with a broad economic outlook provided by Korzenik, Fifth Third’s chief economist and an expert on labor markets.

Korzenik says his greatest concern for the economy is hiring rates, which have been low, a risk to the economy that would be amplified layoffs pick up. He says payroll growth is poor in large part because of the loss of migrant workers. While those low-paid workers don’t contribute much to retail spending, retail sales are broadly flat.

“Hiring rates have been really low and if you aren’t adding to payroll you can’t keep the consumer pushing forward,” Korzenik says.

The loss of migrant workers is likely to create bottlenecks in the economy this year. For example, 12% of the California workforce is estimated to be undocumented and just under 14% of the construction industry is estimated to be undocumented workers. The loss of workers will be obvious in industries such as construction, agriculture and hospitality.

“None of this causes a recession but all it is a bit of a brake on growth with an inflationary aspect,” Korzenik says.

When hiring was brisk and workers were hard to come by, employers tended to hold on to employees for fear they’d have trouble replacing them. That sort of labor hoarding may have stopped, he says.

In March 2022 we had 12 million job openings and 6 million job seekers. Today, job openings and job seekers are more in balance, at 7 million apiece.

“Today, we’re hiring like we are in a recession,” Korzenik says.

Economists are also concerned about the weakening dollar, which dropped 9% last year. Small drops help exporters, but bigger dollar drops can be inflationary and cause the Fed to raise interest rates.

Because of this drag on the economy, Fifth Third Bank projects a 1.5% growth rate in GDP in 2026.

Rob’s Take: This was a long story, but I think, an essential read. North Carolina and specifically the Charlotte Region, remains a very attractive place for business relocations and expansions. But in doing so, the urgent need to build housing for those workers is also growing. Right now, the approval process, depending on the jurisdiction, can be extremely unpredictable, and increases the original costs of the project, adding greatly to the cost of homes. That’s why we are working with elected officials and staff to make plain the need to shorten the development approval timelines and set a limit to the number of review cycles. This would greatly improve our industry’s ability to meet a crucial market need.