Shop Road student housing complex plans fall through a 2nd time

Financing woes have forced a Charlotte developer to scrap plans for a $50 million student housing complex that was to be on Shop Road near Williams-Brice Stadium, a Columbia real estate broker said.

The proposed developer, who all along has declined to be identified, said in January through Columbia commercial Realtors Newmark Grubb Wilson Kibler, was under contract to build some 200 apartments on six acres. The property is next to Hood Construction Co., where a now vacant Shuman-Owens Supply Co. store sits and a car repair shop still operates next door.

The property is back on the market and the price has been reduced by $1 million, said George McCutchen, senior associate and principal owner of commercial real estate firm, which represents the landowners.

A second developer has shown interest in the property for student housing, but McCutchen would not identify the company nor provide details about the new project.

The Charlotte developer’s failed plan is the second student housing development plans to fall through at the same Shop Road location. In 2008, Houston, Texas-based Dinerstein Cos., proposed to build a 196-unit complex on the Shuman-Owens site, but succumbed to the financial dry-up of the Great Recession.

A year earlier, Dinerstein Cos. had finished The Gates at Williams-Brice condominiums, the road from Shuman-Owens, where land was estimated to have cost $1 million for the four acres the condos now sit on.

Student housing, privately or publicly financed, is transforming the availability and cost of the student housing in downtown Columbia and changing the look of the landscape. The surge in th city center has occurred as the Great Recession ended and City Hall offered tax breaks to draw the complexes downtown.

The tax break amounts to 50 percent for complexes that cost at least $40 million to build.

Thousands of new residents, including University of South Carolina students, young professionals and others are expected to fill the new units, many of them upscale digs, as the university and the downtown thrive, experts have projected.

The Shuman-Owens site is primed for the next developer.

The Charlotte developers, who McCutchen said had experience in student housing, got construction supply store land and the car repair properties rezoned from M-1 light industrial in February to RG-3, multi-family residential.

The Shuman-Owens property asking price was previously listed at $3 million, while the garage property was listed for $550,000, real estate agents told The State. But both had been under contract for less than those asking prices.

Shuman-Owen Supply Co., owned by the Bacon family of Columbia, moved to West Columbia earlier this year and the repair shot moved to Lexington County.