Coming out of the pandemic, Dallas-Fort Worth was the No. 1 destination for corporate relocations by a wide margin, but in 2026, the competition is much fiercer, from within Texas and beyond. 

Several internal and external factors have site selectors thinking twice about automatically recommending DFW to their top-tier clients, including rising regional home prices, questions about Dallas’ office market and the rapid ascension of competing national markets. At the same time, more companies are opting to establish regional hubs instead of fully relocating to the metro.  

“DFW had record-shattering success a few years ago … but it’s difficult to sustain that type of success year after year after year,” said John Boyd Jr., principal of Florida-based corporate site selection specialist The Boyd Co.

Bisnow/created with ChatGPT

DFW has added more than 100 corporate headquarters since 2018, thanks to its business-friendly climate, growing population and land availability. The region now boasts more than 20 Fortune 500 companies, and its publicly traded firms have a combined market value of approximately $1.5T.

However, construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc.’s move to Irving in 2022 was the last Fortune 500 company to relocate its headquarters to DFW. 

Fierce Competition

DFW’s Fortune 500 relocation momentum has stalled just as markets like Miami, Charlotte and Phoenix have emerged as major contenders to DFW’s relocation throne. Those cities have their own growing talent pools, business-friendly environments and supportive infrastructures, according to a new CBRE report. 

Without new corporate tenants coming into the market, the future of DFW’s office sector begins to look murky. 

Corporate relocations and Y’all Street fueled the region’s trophy office market last year, but new trophy product is limited, and companies haven’t lined up to fill the 1M SF of office space in Whitacre Tower that will be left vacant when AT&T moves to Plano. 

Intrastate relocations have become more common than full corporate moves in recent years, as have companies establishing regional headquarters in North Texas, according to Mike Rosa, senior vice president of economic development at the Dallas Regional Chamber.

He cited Goldman Sachs’ 800K SF regional campus in Dallas and ScotiaBank’s 133K SF lease at Victory Commons One as examples of these regional hubs and what they bring to the metro. 

Across the country, corporate headquarters relocations grew by more than 70% from 2024 to 2025, according to CBRE. 

DFW nabbed 11 of the 164 headquarters relocations last year, the most of any city in the country. Seven companies also made intrastate moves to DFW, including some that consolidated operations to rightsize their footprints in the metro, according to CBRE.

The Miami metro was second in the nation, with eight new corporate headquarters in 2025, and it scored Palantir Technologies earlier this year. The Austin, Charlotte and New York metros were right behind Miami with seven new headquarters each. 

A North Texas highway

Some of those cities also received more support than DFW from site selectors surveyed this year about the best cities for corporate headquarters projects. After topping Site Selector magazine’s list of best cities for headquarters last year, Dallas fell to fourth this year, behind Nashville, Atlanta and Charlotte. 

Rising home prices in DFW have also made a move to the metro less attractive for corporate executives, who no longer get as much bang for their buck. Median listing prices for homes in DFW have risen more than 40% since the start of the pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 

Winning Formula

With an abundance of undeveloped land, a pro-business climate and a diverse, educated workforce, Texas metros have been the biggest winners of corporate relocations for close to a decade. DFW gained the most new headquarters in the country during that time for those factors, as well as a high quality of life and affordability for businesses, JLL Executive Managing Director Bret Hefton said. 

The region’s favorable tax climate, with no state or local income taxes, is always attractive to companies.

“That’s a big factor when you’re talking to companies that are relocating or considering relocation from New York and California,” Hefton said.

He also praised the metro’s growth and central location in the U.S., which allows for easy transportation to anywhere in the country. 

DFW’s nearly 124,000 new residents made up the second-largest population increase in the nation for the 12 months that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data released last month. 

Booming markets in Collin, Denton and Kaufman counties continue to land major mixed-use projects and master-planned communities for those new residents because of their large swaths of undeveloped land.

The region’s growing population helps companies find workers when they relocate, as does its strong talent pipeline coming from a diverse range of educational institutions, said Mike Rosa, senior vice president of economic development at the Dallas Regional Chamber. 

The Dallas skyline

DFW is also unique for its diversified industries, which allow it to cast a wide net when trying to attract relocations. 

“Whereas Houston is very energy-driven and even though we’ve become more financial services-focused, we’re not nearly as dependent upon that industry as some other markets are with other industries,” Hefton said. 

Looking Ahead 

Many of the nation’s high-growth markets have seen skyrocketing home prices and costs of living, so DFW isn’t alone in struggling to score huge corporate relocations, Boyd said. Concerns about how artificial intelligence will affect real estate commitments in the years ahead have also prompted companies to favor intrastate moves and regional hub setups instead of full headquarters relocations. 

Companies are expected to continue picking DFW for secondary headquarters and regional hubs, but there will also be more full corporate relocations to the metro. 

“That’s what these decisions are based on — it comes to ‘where do we grow?'” Rosa said. 

Hefton said DFW remains a popular destination nationwide for companies considering a move. 

JLL has also engaged with several companies about possible relocations to DFW, but none have yet made full commitments. Still, Hefton said it is inevitable that DFW will see another major corporate relocation soon.  

“There’s a good chance that there will be an announcement in the next 12 months,” Hefton said.

301 S. College St. in Charlotte

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. is finalizing plans to sublease space for its new Charlotte headquarters, the Charlotte Business Journal reports. 

301 South College, formerly called One Wells Fargo Center, boasts 42 stories and 994K SF. The Japan-based financial services company will be subleasing Wells Fargo’s former East Coast headquarters spanning 200K SF.

The deal is expected to close around the beginning of May, the CBJ reports.

SMBC made headlines when it announced last week that it would be making the Queen City the home of its second headquarters in the U.S. SMBC has committed to investing more than $50M to establish the new hub, and it is eligible to receive $70M in state incentives over 12 years, approved by the North Carolina Economic Investment Committee.

The bank, which has more than 150 office locations across 40 countries, will hire employees locally and relocate workers from other offices. The company already has about 180 Charlotte-based employees who work from a small office at 500 E. Morehead St.

The office tower SMBC is moving into was built in 1988. Wells Fargo occupied much of it until 2024, when it consolidated its staff into other office space in Charlotte. The building also previously housed Wachovia National Bank. 

A loan on the tower matured in May 2023 and became delinquent months later. It ultimately went into receivership in October 2023, and a third party took control. 

CBRE still lists the property as available for sale.

SMBC is one of the many banking and fintech companies choosing to invest in Charlotte, largely due to its highly skilled financial services workforce. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Coinbase and SoFi Technologies all announced new deals in the city in the last year.

The first three months of 2026 were the most active period for office landlords since before the pandemic.

Office tenants signed roughly 120M SF in new leases in the first quarter of the year, a 25% increase compared to the first quarter of 2025 and the highest quarterly total since 2018, according to a CoStar report.

The surge was largely driven by a higher volume of smaller leases — a trend that emerged after the pandemic. The number of leases signed hit its highest point going back a decade.

“While the quarterly figure signifies continued momentum for national office recovery, the composition of leasing activity reflects an intensification of patterns that have emerged in the leasing office market since the pandemic began,” CoStar National Director of Office Analytics Phil Mobley wrote in the analysis.

Since the beginning of 2023, new lease sizes remained about 15% below pre-pandemic averages, due in part to restricted hiring and the lack of larger space in newer buildings, according to the report.

Smaller leases also tend to be more fluid with shorter terms, promoting more leasing activity.

Amid the surge, almost half of the nation’s largest office markets have had leasing return within 10% of their pre-pandemic averages — primarily led by Charlotte, New York City, Miami and San Francisco, which are above their 2015 to 2019 averages.

Courtesy of CoStar Group

The demand from banks and financial institutions, which have maintained a higher in-office attendance record, has uplifted leasing recovery. That trend is particularly strong in Charlotte, where Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. have all announced significant expansions.

But there are still a handful of metropolitan areas — including Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, Seattle, San Diego and Philadelphia — that are still below 20% of their pre-pandemic average of office leasing activity.

Looking forward, the first quarter’s momentum may not be sustainable through 2026 amid economic and uncertainty pressures, Mobley wrote.

“On the demand side, the return-to-office movement is reaching its apogee, and job growth remains tepid,” he wrote. “Rising energy costs associated with the conflict with Iran also present a headwind to economic growth and, in turn, to demand for office space.”

Healthcare developers considering building primary care space may be hearing a voice in their heads, one that gives them pause: “If you build it, they may not come.”

That’s because patients increasingly are choosing at-home settings for noncomplex care, making primary care space a less desirable part of the medical office building mix, according to medical developers speaking at the Bisnow‘s Charlotte Healthcare Conference. 

“Healthcare has become a consumer-driven product,” said Mike Orlando, vice president of Realty Trust Group.

The healthcare industry has long pushed to provide more in-home care but has only made incremental progress toward that goal in the last couple of years. However, annual spending for at-home care is expected to rapidly accelerate from $155B in 2025 to nearly $321B by 2035, according to a report from healthcare consulting firm Nova One Advisor. 

A wider pool of providers will be focusing on at-home care in the future, said Sarah Mueller, national director of healthcare for the Beck Group. This presents a challenge for developers of medical office buildings.

“If care is really going to start to get pushed more into the home as much as can be done, what does that mean for the built environment?” she asked at the event, held March 31 at The Union at West Station.

As primary care becomes more decentralized, MOB space is being reshaped or developed into facilities focused on intensive or specialized care.

“The way it changes the built environment is it increases the complexity of patients that are going to be [there],” said Bennett Thompson, vice president of real estate for Atrium Health. 

Given the consumer preference for care close to home, healthcare providers are choosing to open satellite or outpatient offices in neighborhood settings. 

“Patients are more comfortable heading to their neighborhood location, if it’s primary care or something that can be done off campus,” said Ben Barr, managing partner for Woodside Health. “So they don’t have to head to a big parking garage and walk through a whole big hospital.” 

When choosing a location for these local facilities, Orlando said accessibility, visibility and convenience are key. He noted that prime locations might be an inline strip center or a grocery-anchored shopping center. These sorts of locations are also good spots for urgent care centers. 

“Is it on the way to and from school and work? Can I get in easily? Those are all factors,” he said. 

This pull away from primary care space comes at a time when new MOB space, in general, can be hard to come by. This isn’t because of a lack of demand. 

From a national standpoint, demand for medical outpatient offices is high. In the state of North Carolina, for example, there are 199 outpatient clinics that employ more than 28,000 workers and earn more than $5B in revenue each year. The MOB market occupancy rate was record-setting in Charlotte, above 93%, according to a November 2025 PwC report on trends in commercial real estate. 

However, the expenses of constructing new medical space is becoming prohibitive. The fit-out cost for medical outpatient facilities has reached $412 per SF, according to a February JLL guide on MOBs. 

This makes existing MOB space a sought-after commodity. Investment in MOB space, driven largely by sales, rose 35% year-over-year in 2025 to $12.6B, according to CBRE. The Southeast led the way in investment dollars in MOB in Q4 2025, specifically, with $1.6B spent on such space in the region. 

Overall, Charlotte has emerged as a med-tech innovation hub, with work currently underway on the $1.5B The Pearl district, a 26-acre development anchored by the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and backed by Atrium Health and Wexford Science & Technology.

Japanese financial giant Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. has selected Charlotte as its second U.S. headquarters, with plans to add roughly 2,000 jobs over the next six years.

An aerial view of Charlotte

SMBC is the latest big-name banking institution to plant a major flag in Charlotte, joining JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup as well as a cadre of fintech players that have all announced new investments in the Queen City over the past year.

“Our highly skilled workforce makes businesses want to establish themselves and grow here, and that in turn makes other people want to move and settle here,” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said Tuesday during a press conference announcing the SMBC deal.

Tokyo-based SMBC committed to invest some $50M to establish its new hub in the city and is expected to receive $70M in state grant funding. 

This latest wave of investment has strengthened the Queen City’s reputation as a financial heavyweight and driven growth across its commercial real estate sectors.

Banks and fintechs are choosing to invest in Charlotte because they believe the city has reached a critical mass that is continually drawing and retaining a highly skilled workforce. The metro area netted 54,000 residents from 2024 to 2025 to reach 2.9 million by July. That growth rate ranks fifth among all U.S. metro areas, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.  

Such a steady growth of the workforce is compelling for companies seeking to relocate, according to Peter Gwaltney, CEO and president of the North Carolina Bankers Association. Charlotte ranked second in Site Selection’s most recent annual survey of best U.S. cities for corporate headquarters. 

“A company can locate or relocate to Charlotte and find not just the number of people it needs but a uniquely talented group of people across a wide diverse set of skills, whether it’s compliance, security, IT, commercial banking, risk management,” Gwaltney said. 

Wayflyer, an Irish fintech company specializing in financing for e-commerce businesses, announced in October 2025 it would be opening a new U.S. hub in Charlotte. Wayflyer Director of Credit Chloe Grennan said what Charlotte had to offer made the decision a no-brainer for the company.

“Charlotte came out clearly on top when we did a thorough market evaluation,” Grennan said in an email. “The combination of factors was hard to beat: a strategic East Coast location, a time zone that works well for our global operations, and a deep talent pool built around the city’s history as a financial services hub.”

SMBC announced it would develop a banking hub in Charlotte.

Investment has been helped by a state willing to provide incentives through the jobs development investment grants and other programs. The state doled out just over $98M across 21 deals through the job development grant program in 2024, according to Site Selection’s 2025 report on U.S. economic incentives.

Fintech companies first flocked to Charlotte during the young industry’s initial boom years following the Great Recession. The fintech ecosystem has since had staying power in the city throughout the ups and downs of the young industry. 

Digital services company SoFi Technologies announced last fall it would open a regional hub in Charlotte as part of a $3M capital investment, and Coinbase leased 59K SF in June for a customer service hub.

As the fintech wave in the city has matured, institutional banking and investment firms have deepened their roots there. Last month, Capital Group announced it would be opening a major East Coast operations hub in Charlotte with a $60M investment. Charles Schwab Corp. signed a lease for 59K SF in February, and Citigroup announced it would invest $16.1M to establish a major office facility in Charlotte. 

These investments are being supplemented by a national push among big banks to add new brick-and-mortar branches. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which already boasts more than 25 branches in Charlotte, is currently aiming to open five new locations this year as part of its plan to open some 500 new branch locations nationwide in 2026. Truist, Bank of America and Huntington Bank all announced plans to open branches in the Charlotte area as well. 

Alexandra Friedman, head of retail real estate at JPMorgan Chase, told Bisnow that financial organizations are choosing Charlotte because the city boasts “talent, a diverse economy, and an ecosystem that supports established firms and innovation.”

Many of the young, educated workforce in the metro area are graduates from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the state’s largest business school, said Tracy Dodson, chief operating officer and head of economic development of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance. 

“Many graduates are staying in the Charlotte market, and that’s largely because of the partnership with our biggest employers, many of which are in financial services,” Dodson said. 

That influx of residents may soon pay off in the city’s multifamily market. 

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein at the 2025 swearing-in ceremony of his administration’s cabinet members

Like other Sun Belt markets, Charlotte’s multifamily sector is working off a glut of overbuilding. Vacancies continued to inch up in Q4 2025 thanks to high deliveries, but the increase in vacancy has started to level off, according to Northmarq’s Q4 2025 multifamily report.

However, the metro region saw a net of 14,500 multifamily move-ins in 2025, breaking the previous year’s record of net move-ins by 15%, Northmarq reports. Supply growth is expected to taper off, vacancies will flatten, and rent is expected to grow a modest 0.5% in 2026, according to Northmarq. 

A Q1 Marcus & Millichap office report forecasts that the metro will add a total of 14,000 new jobs in 2026, including 3,500 traditionally office jobs. The Charlotte region ranked second in the country for total job growth last year, adding 37,600 jobs in 2025.

For a city with a thriving business sector, office vacancy remains high in Charlotte. That’s because developers raced to build new office space to meet corporate needs right before the pandemic hit, only to watch as the work-from-home movement during the pandemic left many of those spaces empty. 

But office vacancy peaked at 18% in 2023, according to Marcus & Millichap. Since then, it has gone steadily downward and is projected to shrink to just above 15% in 2026. According to Colliers, Charlotte’s average asking rent for office space in Q4 2025 was 2.1% higher year-over-year, thanks to a shrinking pipeline and rising development costs.

And many of the banks and fintechs entering Charlotte are bringing in employees from other markets, with retail and multifamily benefiting from this influx, said CBRE Executive Vice President John Christenbury. Marcus & Millichap ranked the city No. 1 in the nation in its 2026 retail forecast. 

“You’ve got more consumers that are going to live, go out to eat and shop in Charlotte now, so, ultimately, these added jobs benefit the rest of the economy, like residential and retail,” Christenbury said.

All this combines to create a kind of permanent momentum, at least in the near term, analysts say. Gwaltney said Charlotte should easily be able to maintain its status as a financial heavyweight moving forward, and this will continue to help the city’s CRE sectors.

“Where there’s a healthy, thriving economy, that’s where banks want to be. That’s opportunity,” Gwaltney said.

Hirofumi Otsuka, CEO for SMBC Americas, said as much in his statement about his bank’s new investment in the city.  

“As SMBC continues to grow substantially in the United States, Charlotte is a standout location for us to invest in North Carolina for the long term in a major expansion that will establish our roots in the community,” he said.

U.S. office vacancy hit a new high as commercial real estate’s subdued 2025 performance carried into the first quarter of 2026, according to a report from Moody’s Analytics.

Two markets in Texas and California led the increase in vacancy rates, with nearly 1M SF of office occupancy losses each.

The industry is navigating an “increasingly complex set of crosscurrents,” including renewed inflationary pressure, resilient high-income consumer spending and restrained office leasing demand that will likely keep CRE performance uneven in the near term, per Moody’s Analytics CRE Preliminary Trend Analysis for Q1 2026. 

The 21% office vacancy rate is up 10 basis points from the previous quarter and up 60 bps from the previous year. The new vacancy rate is 4% higher than the 17% vacancy rate recorded in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. 

Oakland-East Bay, California, led the U.S. in negative absorption with 944K SF of occupancy lost, according to the report. That was followed by Austin with 870K SF of negative absorption, then Chicago with 571K SF lost and San Jose, California, with 540K SF lost. 

Occupied office stock expanded during 2021 and 2022 as firms worked through pre-pandemic leases, but now 10 of the last 13 quarters have shown net contraction. The overall decline was 5.2M SF in the first quarter, bringing the decline since 2025’s first quarter to nearly 20M SF, the report states.

The trend reflects structural and cyclical forces, including the demand for higher-quality space and smaller footprints. Moody’s expects vacancy to continue rising this year as more leases expire.

Across all asset classes, Moody’s reports broadly stable performance. Multifamily rent growth remained modest, increasing less than 1%, amid a 10-bps increase in vacancy to 6.8%. Markets with the most aggressive construction pipelines, particularly Sun Belt markets like Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte and San Antonio, saw increased vacancy rates. 

Retail “delivered mild upside surprises” with a flat vacancy rate of 10.4%. Strong consumer spending is helping but keeping the sector steady rather than spurring growth as labor markets soften and cost-of-living pressures increase.  

Industrial rents flattened as vacancy ticked up 10 bps to 8.4%, its highest level since 2021, as inventory growth narrowly outpaced occupancy gains. Industrial net absorption totaled 1.3M SF during the quarter. 

Ashford Hospitality Trust offloaded a 252-room hotel in the heart of Old Town Alexandria at a sharp discount from the price it paid eight years ago.

The Hilton Alexandria Old Town at 1767 King St.

The Dallas-based REIT sold the Hilton Alexandria Old Town to Charlotte-based Lodging Capital Partners, Ashford revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It said the property sold for $58M in an all-cash deal. 

This is the second time Lodging Capital Partners has owned the property. After owning it for five years, the company sold it to Ashford Hospitality Trust in 2018 for $111M.

Ashford Hospitality Trust and Lodging Capital Partners didn’t respond to Bisnow‘s requests for comment.

The 26-year-old hotel at 1767 King St. sits next to the King Street-Old Town Metro station.

With its 2018 purchase, Ashford had received a $73.5M, five-year interest-only, nonrecourse mortgage, the company revealed at the time. It was the first acquisition under a new agreement expected to benefit from Ashford’s Enhanced Return Funding Program, under which Ashford Inc. would provide equity for the REIT’s acquisitions. 

Ashford’s filing says it paid back $32.5M of the loan along with this sale. It also released financial statements that mention a preliminary “non-recurring loss associated with the disposition of the hotel property.”

The REIT reported a $28.4M operating income loss on the Hilton property in 2025. 

HREC Investment Advisors’ Scott Stephens and Mark Morris brokered the deal on behalf of the seller. 

Ashford, which owns more than 15,000 hotel rooms across the country, was trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $2.60 per share as of 2 p.m. ET Monday, down nearly 60% year-over-year.  

Ashford’s properties range between what it calls luxury and upper midscale. Locally, the REIT owns The Melrose in Georgetown, The Churchill north of Dupont Circle, Embassy Suites hotels in Crystal City and Herndon, the Marriott Gateway in Arlington, Courtyards in Gaithersburg and Crystal City, and the Residence Inn Fairfax. 

Lodging Capital Partners, which also has a national hotel portfolio, provided debt for the 470-room Marriott Georgetown in 2025, according to its website. 

Like the D.C. region, Alexandria’s hotel sector has been struggling over the past year, ALXnow reported in October, citing city data.

While revenue per available room, or RevPAR, in Alexandria increased by 4.5% between July 2024 and January 2025, the metric declined 12.4% between February and April of last year, and it fell 6.5% between May and August. 

By comparison, between May and August, Arlington’s RevPAR was down 7.8%, Fairfax County’s was down 0.5%, D.C.’s was down 9.7%, and Prince George’s County’s was down 4.1%.

Digital Realty has closed its inaugural U.S. hyperscale development fund, an effort that represents a new approach to securing development capital for the world’s largest data center provider.

At the same time, the public REIT signaled a renewed commitment to pursuing private capital strategies to fund new data center build-out, announcing the hire of two executives to help lead its dedicated fund team. 

A Digital Realty data center in Ontario, Canada

The closure of Digital Realty’s first private development fund comes almost exactly a year after it was launched. The fund received $3.25B from a range of institutional investors — including public pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and foundations, corporate pensions, insurance and asset managers, and family offices — to support more than $10B of new hyperscale investment. 

The fund owns 80% of a portfolio of Digital Realty’s stabilized data centers and preleased development sites, including properties in Northern Virginia, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York and Northern California. Digital Realty maintains a 20% ownership stake and manages the fund. 

Creating a private development fund was a novel approach to leveraging existing data centers to raise the capital needed to build new ones — a major challenge for developers across the digital infrastructure space. The arrangement allows institutional investors to receive a steady stream of income from the fully leased data centers, while Digital Realty uses the invested capital to cover predevelopment and development costs without relying on project-specific debt. 

Digital Realty told investors the fund is part of a $15B liquidity pool from private capital it calls “dry powder” to bank land and power ahead of demand to be able to deliver capacity on short timelines when Big Tech tenants need it.

“We remain focused on sourcing and delivering hyperscale data center capacity to support our customers’ accelerating requirements, and private capital is playing an increasingly important role in how we prudently and efficiently scale PlatformDIGITAL,” Digital Realty Chief Investment Officer Greg Wright said Monday in a written statement.

“Strengthening our private capital capabilities enhances our customer focus, expands our ability to fund growth, and positions Digital Realty for durable long-term value creation.”

Digital Realty plans to continue using this new private capital strategy to augment the on-balance-sheet financing strategies it has traditionally used to fund new development, announcing Monday that it is adding a pair of experienced executives with private capital and fund management backgrounds to its leadership team. 

Former CBRE Senior Managing Director Michael Yang will join Digital Realty as the firm’s executive director for fund management. Yang previously held various investment management roles at Goldman Sachs, NEPC, GID and AEW Capital Management.

The company also brought on Bradley Petersen to serve as managing director for private capital fundraising. Prior to Digital Realty, Peterson held a similar position at Jamestown LP following stints at Garrison Investment Group and Aetos Capital Real Estate.

Capital Group is opening a major East Coast operations hub in Charlotte, the company announced in a release Thursday.

An aerial view of Charlotte

The new hub will be a base for the investment firm’s legal, compliance, technology and data work, and it will also support its domestic and international growth, according to the release. The firm said it had selected Charlotte due to the metro area’s “strong and growing talent pool” in the financial services space and its thriving business scene. 

“Charlotte stood out as a natural fit for Capital Group’s next phase of growth,”  Capital Group Chief Operating Officer Rob Klausner said in a press release from the city of Charlotte.

Capital didn’t disclose the exact location of the hub, but Axios reports it will be in Uptown Charlotte. 

The hub will bring in an additional $5.2B in state tax revenue over 12 years, according to the North Carolina governor’s office. The state is making available up to $17M in reimbursement funds through the state’s job development investment grant program because of the firm’s estimated $60M investment in the state. 

As part of the move, the firm will close its office in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area by the end of 2027, Bloomberg reported. 

In the same announcement, Capital said it would invest in its newly purchased Los Angeles headquarters. This past week, the company entered an agreement with a Brookfield Properties entity to purchase the Bank of America Plaza office tower at 333 S. Hope St. in Downtown Los Angeles. It previously leased 320K SF of office space at the tower in a long-term lease that was set to expire in 2030. 

Capital boasts more than 9,300 associates in 33 offices across the world, including Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. Sixteen of those offices are in the U.S., with four in California.

Queen City Quarter, a food and entertainment complex at 201 E. Trade St. in uptown Charlotte, is going up for sale, with three of its tenants currently facing eviction, The Charlotte Observer reported. 

The Sea Grill restaurant at Queen City Quarter in Charlotte

It is a long fall for what once was a storied spot in uptown Charlotte. In its former life as the Epicentre, the complex was a popular nightlife destination that hosted events including NBA All-Star Weekend festivities. 

Now, a few years after its rebrand into a family-friendly entertainment center, only about 12 of its 50 retail spaces are occupied, and the center has experienced a net loss of eight businesses in just the last half year. 

Most recently, the planned Philadelphia-based Taste Cheesesteak Bar, which was slated to open in October 2024 but never did, is facing eviction. A complaint was filed this month stating that the restaurant owed $25,608 after not paying its monthly rent of $4,823 and other charges since January.

An eviction order was also placed on the Sea Grill Restaurant & Bar, which opened in the complex less than two years ago. That restaurant reportedly owes nearly $96K in back rent, having missed payments since last October. A complaint filed on Jan. 28 claimed that rent owed reached more than $144K after factoring in various fees.

Privee Clothing Rhema’s Boutique, a designer brand retailer that opened in the Quarter in 2023, is also under threat. A complaint for eviction was filed last September for $3,082 past due in rent. This case is currently pending an appeal, the Observer reported.

Separately, two other units, a CVS store and the Tailored Smoke Cigar Lounge, have been reported as closed in the one-block complex. 

Property management firm CBRE said on March 11 the complex will go up for sale “in a few weeks.” An exact date was not provided.

Some Queen City Quarter tenants were surprised by the news of its pending sale and hope the next owner will work to drive more foot traffic to the complex.

The Epicentre originally opened in 2008. In 2014, California real estate firm CIM Group purchased it for $130.5M, when it was almost fully leased and boasted 16 restaurants. 

The Charlotte Observer reported that the complex first began to falter due to an increase in crime and the effects of the pandemic on retail and restaurant spaces. In 2021, when the center was 70% vacant, it was forced into receivership after it defaulted on an $85M loan. 

In 2022, lender Deutsche Bank took control of the complex for $95M at a foreclosure auction, before renovating and rebranding it as the Quarter.

This string of Charlotte retail closures comes despite the city being named one of the top retail markets in the country in a recent report by Marcus & Millichap. Metro Charlotte saw slowed construction and increased net absorption in 2025, making for a 3.5% vacancy rate — one of the 10 lowest among major markets. Much of the city’s retail success was driven by big-box, single-tenant move-ins.