14401 Southlake Crossing LLC, the developer of the 76k SF 14401 Carowinds Blvd, recently sold the property for $12M to a private investor. The deal highlights investor demand in Charlotte for net-lease office buildings, particularly ones leased to a hot industry here: call centers.

"Our client saw an opportunity to fill an underserved need for office space with high parking ratios, and delivered a long-term leased, redeveloped asset,” says Stan Johnson Co director Britton Burdette, a net-lease specialist in the company's Atlanta office who repped the seller. The building is fully leased to iQor, a major business outsourcing company.

The developer bought the 19-acre site last year for over $4M from Deere & Co. The southwest Charlotte property used to be home to a Deere research facility. The developers razed that structure and built one suitable for back-office or call center use, and before long iQor inked a long-term lease for the whole thing.

Investors want call centers in greater Charlotte because call center operators such as iQor want to be in the market. According to Site Selection Group, the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia MSA has the seventh largest concentration of call centers in the US, with about 51,600 people in the industry here.

iQor operates its largest business services operation in Charlotte with over 1,000 agents handling more than 11 million calls per year. It recently outgrew its old space in what is now the Belk HQ building on West Tyvola.