MBK Senior Living announced that construction has officially begun on a comprehensive renovation of The Bellettini, a senior living community in the heart of downtown Bellevue, Washington. The transformation is expected to be completed in Summer 2026.

The transformation will enhance key shared spaces throughout the community, including the lobby, concierge and valet areas, and signature dining venues. “This renovation reflects a deep respect for what The Bellettini has always been, while thoughtfully enhancing how it feels to live here each day,” said Brian Prouty, Executive Director of The Bellettini.

“We’re creating an environment that feels both elevated and comfortable—where residents can continue to enjoy the connections, experiences, and sense of ease they value, now within beautifully refreshed surroundings.”

The Bellettini features 144 independent and assisted living apartments. MBK Senior Living is a provider of independent living, assisted living, and memory care communities across the Western United States.

The former Duke Energy building in downtown Charlotte is going down. It needs to be demolished so Asana Partners and MRP Realty can move forward on their $250 million redevelopment plan. The Charlotte Business Journal reports the building at 526 S. Church St. won’t be demolished until the fall, and construction should start soon after. Full delivery is slated for the fourth quarter of 2026. The project team includes SK&I Architecture, LandDesign, Morris Adjmi Architects and Balfour Beatty.

The plan includes converting the 1970s-era office tower into 448 luxury apartments with 25,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and demolishing the front lobby and atrium. That would reduce the total square footage by about 230,000 and make way for a three-story, 30,000-square-foot retail building.

Asana Partners and MRP paid $35 million for the site in December 2022.

Duke Energy Plaza is moving into a new 40-story tower at 525 S. Tryon St.

The Catawba Nation will break ground on a new $700 million casino complex, Two Kings Casino Resort, in Kings Mountain, NC. The first phase includes an “introductory casino” with 1,350 electronic gaming machines, 12 table games, a 40-seat restaurant and a sportsbook area. It’s expected to open in 2026.

The second phase of the Kings Mountain project will include a 400-room hotel and the full casino complex. The casino will be around 2 million square feet and feature 4,300 slot machines, 100 table games, five restaurants, six bars and a players’ lounge. The Catawbas say the casino resort will employ 2,200 people upon full buildout. There is no timetable for construction of the second phase.

Kings Mountain is near the border of South Carolina and North Carolina and approximately 33 miles West of Charlotte. 

Delaware North, a global hospitality and entertainment consultant, will develop and manage the casino resort.

Albion Residential has secured a $102 million construction loan from Pacific Life Insurance for the first of two towers. Named Albion Music Row, the towers will be built on the former Beaman’s car lot in Nashville. Albion Music Row’s site is comprised of five lots located at the southwest corner of the intersection of McGavock Street and 14th Avenue, totaling 2 acres. Construction on the tower, led by Clark Construction, will begin immediately and be completed in the Fall of 2026.

The first tower will be 29 stories and 350 feet and include 458 units. It will include micro, studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, as well as 4,000 square feet of ground-level restaurant/brewery space. 

When its second tower is completed, Albion Music Row will eventually feature more than 850 units, restaurants and retail, and a dedicated public plaza. 

Matthew Schoenfeldt, Mary Dooley, and Brian Dawson led the JLL Capital Markets Debt Advisory team, which helped secure the loan. Albion Music Row was designed by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture of Chicago.

Data center developer Flexential is planning to dramatically expand its data center footprint with new construction in the coming years, and it is kicking off the push with a big project in the Atlanta market. 

Courtesy of Flexential

A rendering of the data center Flexential is building in Douglasville, Georgia.

The Charlotte-based colocation provider began construction on a 150K SF, 22.5-megawatt data center in Douglasville, Georgia, and Flexential executives tell Bisnow it is the first step of an aggressive national growth strategy. 

The company plans to build around 93 MW of data center capacity by the end of next year, more than four times the 19 MW it built between 2019 and 2021. 

“We’re going to deploy 33 MW this year. Next year we’re targeting 60, and it’s going to be at that higher level moving forward,” Flexential Chief Operating Officer Ryan Mallory told Bisnow. “We’ve talked about some other markets — we have a strategic game board that we continue to focus on, and we will continue to expand in existing markets and new ones as well.”

The push comes after Flexential in December raised $2.1B through a securitization offering, a deal the company said was the largest asset-backed securities issuance in the history of the data center industry.  

According to Mallory, the new Douglasville facility will be fully built out and ready for deployments at its full capacity by the end of the year. Initial tenants will include software as a service firms already under contract with Flexential, although company officials predict demand will be driven by large public cloud providers that need so-called edge deployments in the range of 2 to 5 MW. 

Power will be provided by hyperlocal utility GreyStone Power Corp. Renewable energy will account for less than half the power supplied to the Douglasville site. But as Bisnow has reported previously, data centers have become a key driver of renewable energy development in Georgia, particularly through partnerships with hyperlocal utilities like GreyStone.  

Courtesy of Flexential

Flexential Chief Operating Officer Ryan Mallory

With existing legacy data centers in the nearby communities of Alpharetta and Norcross, power cost and availability were the driving site selection factors pushing Flexential to Douglasville, Mallory said.

As is typical in data center development, Flexential’s site selection process also weighed fiber connectivity, tax incentives and land cost. Mallory said the company also paid close attention to economic growth trends within the Atlanta market to find sites close to emerging commercial hubs and potential customers who value both physical access to the data centers and the low latency created by proximity to their servers.   

“We start looking at marketwide GDP growth, and then, within the market, we look at it on a micro-level: Where are the people going, and where are businesses investing?” Mallory told Bisnow. “This site ticked all the boxes.” 

In addition to new development in Atlanta, Flexential just completed construction on a 36 MW facility in the West Coast data center hub of Hillsboro, Oregon, and significantly increased the capacity of its Denver-area data center. Mallory said it is planning more development in the 19 North American markets where Flexential already has a presence. 

“In all of our existing markets that are top 10 markets for growth, we have a focus on expansion,” Mallory said. “We’re watching them closely, and like in Atlanta, when we find the right type of property with the right type of partners, we move forward with it.” 

Flexential’s expansion in the coming months will likely also include development in new regions, particularly smaller second- and third-tier markets, Mallory said.

Although company officials declined to provide specific locations, Mallory said there are seven specific markets the company is “actively pursuing.” He said these are regions where existing customers have asked for additional infrastructure or where potential tenants have been identified. The bulk of these tenants would be hyperscale cloud providers in need of smaller edge deployments.

Finding appropriate locations for new data center development in these smaller markets can be a challenge, Mallory said, as property owners, utilities, builders and other local partners are less familiar with the industry and the intricacies of data center site selection. But with demand surging and colocation providers looking to pull the trigger once the right site becomes available, Mallory said CRE professionals in emerging data center markets should be familiarizing themselves with the industry if they want to be able to take advantage of what is likely to be a wave of providers looking for places to build. 

“Make sure you’re getting close to companies like Flexential that are operating in the Tier 2 or Tier 3 markets,” he said. “All of us are active right now looking for partners.”