Forget the Empty Office Tower. Charlotte's Best Conversion Candidates Are Its Empty Schools.

The school system that fired its superintendent last week owns some of the best real estate in the Carolinas, and nobody inside that building is going to make a bold decision about any of it this year. That is worth understanding, because the buildings are not going anywhere, and neither is the housing shortage.

Twenty years ago I sold a building this whole city was arguing about. What I learned doing it applies directly to the buildings CMS is arguing about now. I'll get to that. But first, a lightbulb.

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The Lightbulb That Killed the Office Conversion

For three years everyone in real estate has been talking about turning empty office towers into apartments. Very few have actually done it, and the reason is stranger than the usual explanation about cost.

Before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, no desk in an office could sit more than about 30 feet from a window that opened. There was no other way to see your paperwork or survive July. So the prewar office was built narrow, with light wells and courtyards, and it turns out residential codes today require almost exactly the same thing: nothing more than 25 to 30 feet from an operable window. Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan laid this out in the New York Times a few years ago, citing architectural historian Carol Willis. Two inventions, the fluorescent tube and air conditioning, freed the office from the window, and floor plates ballooned to 100 feet deep and beyond. Energy was cheap. Nobody cared.

So a 1920s office tower converts and a 1975 office tower mostly doesn't. The postwar office was designed, quite deliberately, to be a place nobody would ever want to live. Manhattan has enough prewar stock to make a business of conversions. Charlotte built most of its skyline after 1970 and doesn't.

What Charlotte has instead is a large inventory of well-built, well-located buildings that were designed for people from the first brick. We call them schools.

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Schoolhouses are now the Ffastest-Growing Source of Residential Conversions in the Country

A classroom has a wall of windows. The corridor already organizes the floor. Ceilings are high, parking exists, and the building sits in a neighborhood people already know how to find. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that nearly 2,000 apartments were created from former school buildings in 2024, four times the previous year, with more than 9,300 units in the pipeline at the start of 2026.

The supply is coming whether anyone plans for it or not. CMS enrolled 139,476 students this year, its lowest count since 2012. Fewer children, more empty buildings.

And a school carries something no office tower ever will. Your neighbor learned to read there. Somebody's father played basketball in that gym. That attachment is why a school can't be sold like a parcel, and why the same kind of building becomes a neighborhood asset in one place and a boarded-up eyesore for five years in another.

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Four Schools, One Architect, Four Different Answers

In 1924 Charlotte hired a local architect named Louis Asbury to design a set of new schools. Three of them are in this story, and a century later each has landed somewhere different.

Wilmore School, West Boulevard. Opened 1925, closed 1978, then decades of leasing, vacancy, squatters and eventually arson. In 2022 CMS put it into a process with Preservation North Carolina, the city rezoned it in 2024, and in February 2025 it sold for $8.16 million. Construction started this month: 175 residences, 3,500 square feet of retail, the original building preserved, delivery in 2028. When preservation, zoning and a buyer line up in that order, this is what you get.

Morgan School, Cherry. Opened 1925 for the neighborhood's Black children, closed in 1968, and then used for half a century for whatever CMS needed. In the 1980s that was a program for pregnant teenagers everyone called TAPS. I was 14, riding the bus to Piedmont Middle, and we went past it every morning. I remember trying to wrap my head around a whole school of pregnant high schoolers, and I remember that nobody on that bus thought the name was strange. Try opening a school today and calling it TAPS.

Parks Hutchison School, 1400 North Graham Street. Opened September 1926 on four acres in the Lockwood neighborhood, a few blocks from uptown. Still owned by the Board of Education. Never sold, never declared surplus. It just sits, a short walk from some of the most expensive dirt in the Carolinas, doing whatever the district decides it does this year.

I can't drive past it without slowing down. My father volunteered there for ten years in an after-school tutoring program. That is where he met a little boy named Daniel, and the two of them stuck. Daniel grew up, joined the Marines, and has a family of his own now. The last time I saw him was at my father's funeral. He came to say goodbye to the man who helped him with his homework in a building CMS has never figured out what to do with.

And one Asbury didn't design: Smith School, Tyvola Road. Closed in 2021, declared surplus, taken back off the list, and left boarded for four years next to an operating magnet school while parents photographed needles and encampments. This spring Mecklenburg County bought roughly eight acres for $4.5 million and plans 100 to 300 apartments for teachers and county employees. A good outcome. The building still comes down, and the decision took five years.

The real estate was never the variable in any of these. What varied was who owned the decision and what the public body actually wanted.

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The Coliseum

In 2005 I got a call asking whether I wanted to sell the Charlotte Coliseum.

It was a 23,000-seat white elephant on the west side, obsolete a decade after it opened, sitting empty while the new arena opened uptown. Half the city thought building the new arena was a waste of money. The other half thought tearing down a perfectly good old one was worse. Crescent Resources had a standing bid of $16.5 million, down from $24 million after the city changed the zoning, and city staff had spent 18 months trying to beat it.

I put my fee at risk: we would only get paid if net proceeds beat $16.5 million. Then I ran it the way my friends in investment banking run a sale. Two thousand marketing packages. An online data room. And because state law required a public upset-bid process, every conversation with every bidder ran through me, so anything said to one buyer was said to all of them.

We also ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal. The ad found nobody. Clay Grubb found the buyer. Clay is a developer here in town and a friend, and he suggested I call Mason Zimmerman at Pope & Land in Atlanta. I called the next morning. Mason said he'd meet me at a Starbucks that Saturday and walk the building. Comstock opened the bidding at $17.82 million. Pope & Land went to $19 million. Three rounds later Pope & Land owned it at $23.35 million, 46 percent over the standing bid. For the next two years, whenever Mason came to Charlotte, he slept in the Coliseum and rollerbladed the concourse for exercise. You do not get that from a classified ad.

Two UNC Charlotte professors later wrote a teaching case on the sale. They called it an overwhelming success from the public sector's perspective and unusually non-controversial given the size of the asset.

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"Government Has No Business Playing Developer"

Agreed. Completely.

A bureaucracy exists to keep the people inside it employed, and the fastest way for a career public servant to get a brick through the front door is to try something new. Nobody has ever been fired for leaving a school boarded up. Smith School sat for five years and the only people who paid for it were the parents next door.

The neighborhoods are not innocent either. The loudest voices against gentrification are often standing guard over a shuttered building whose only residents are the ones setting fires to stay warm. Wilmore nearly burned down while everyone argued about who deserved it.

Then there is CMS itself. This week the board fired Superintendent Crystal Hill 5 to 4, the chair stepped down, four senior executives have already left, the district attorney has asked the state to investigate the district's finances, and the interim superintendent had submitted her own resignation before she got the job. Nobody in that building is going to attempt a creative real estate structure this year, and honestly they shouldn't.

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Don't Innovate. Count.

Ask CMS for the one dull thing a bureaucracy is built to do: an audit. Every parcel the district owns, in one public document. Which are in use, which are leased, which are boarded, and which are quietly costing money to secure and insure.

It costs almost nothing. The district already has the deeds. It is politically safe, because no one has ever been run out of office for counting. And a new surplus list has been promised since the Comprehensive Review began in 2023, so it isn't even a new idea. Publish it. Once the inventory is in the open, the market does the risky part. That is what the upset-bid law did for the Coliseum. It moved the decision to a place where competition, not hope, set the price.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the YMCA selling its Morrison branch, and the line holds here: nobody wants to be the director who sold the building, and that is exactly how a building ends up running the board. A school board is no different. Attachment gets to the decision first, and then the roof starts leaking.

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Ready to Sell a Building the Public Thinks It Owns?

The Comprehensive Asset Sale™ is the process we built out of the Coliseum: a structured disposition for complex real estate that starts with what the owner actually wants, surfaces every problem before a buyer finds it, and runs the sale so that competition sets the price.

If you sit on a board, a vestry, a foundation or a family office that is about to face this decision, or you want to be on the call list when the next surplus inventory drops, give us a call or shoot us an email and we'll walk you through it.

Cardinal Real Estate Partners | 704-900-0900 | www.Cardinal-Partners.com

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