The Deal Behind the Deal: How Avison Young Is Reading Raleigh's Next Decade

Every skyline has a story underneath it. The cranes over North Hills, the warehouses filling in along I-540, the office towers downtown that are either buzzing again or still finding their footing. Someone is reading all of that for a living, translating growth into strategy for the businesses, investors, and property owners trying to make sense of it. In Raleigh, one of the firms doing that reading is Avison Young, and the office here has a clear-eyed view of what makes this market different from the ones they work in everywhere else.

Who They Are

Avison Young is a global commercial real estate firm that helps businesses, property owners, and investors buy, sell, lease, and manage properties across office, industrial, retail, and multifamily. That range covers the entire spectrum of who touches commercial real estate, from a small business owner hunting for a first storefront to a large institutional investor closing a nine-figure acquisition.

Locally, Avison Young's Raleigh office delivers strategic, data-driven commercial real estate advisory services backed by a global platform and a deeply connected local team. The pitch isn't just national reach. It's national reach paired with brokers who know which submarkets are moving and why, because they're the ones walking the sites and sitting across the table from local owners and tenants every week.

That combination, global resources with local fluency, shapes how the office operates. It's a firm big enough to underwrite a major multifamily acquisition and small enough, in its Raleigh presence, to still know its clients by name.

Their Origin Story

Avison Young didn't land in Raleigh on a whim. Over the last decade, the Triangle has seen immense growth, and as a firm, Avison Young felt it was necessary to put its resources into this market. That's a deliberate way of saying they watched the trajectory here long enough to be confident it wasn't a blip.

Part of that confidence comes from the region's talent pipeline. The firm has been clear that it's very confident in the talent originating from nearby universities, the kind of deep, renewable bench of graduates that keeps feeding employers across the Triangle. A market can grow on cheap land or low taxes for a while, but growth that keeps compounding usually has a university system underneath it. Raleigh has several, and Avison Young built its local strategy around that fact.

What They Do Today

On the ground in Raleigh, Avison Young's team works across the full lifecycle of a commercial real estate decision. Their core service lines include:

Landlord Representation | Strategic leasing and asset positioning for property owners looking to fill space and hold value.

Tenant Representation | Site selection, lease negotiations, and long-term occupancy planning for businesses of every size.

Investment Sales | Acquisition and disposition advisory, along with the underwriting work that tells an investor whether a deal actually pencils.

Property Management | Day-to-day operational excellence and tenant experience, the unglamorous work that keeps a building performing.

Project Management | Oversight from concept to completion, for owners and tenants building out or repositioning space.

That range matters in a market like Raleigh's, where the story looks different depending on which asset class you're standing in. Raleigh continues to benefit from strong population growth, a deep talent pipeline from the Triangle's universities, and corporate relocations and expansions. Industrial and multifamily have been particularly active. Office is recovering, but unevenly, depending heavily on submarket and building quality. A firm that only played in one of those lanes would be reading half the market. Avison Young's Raleigh team is built to read all of it, and to move a client between asset classes as their needs change.

What They Wish Every Client Knew Going In

Ask the Raleigh team what trips people up, and the answers aren't about market timing or negotiating leverage. They're about process.

The biggest mistake first-time tenants make is underestimating the timeline and the total occupancy cost, not just the quoted base rent, but CAM and TICAM charges, build-out costs, and rent escalations layered on top. A quoted rate that looks affordable on day one can look very different once those line items stack up. Just as costly is waiting too long to bring in a broker. Engaging one early, before touring spaces or signing anything, is the difference between negotiating from information and negotiating from pressure.

Landlords have their own blind spot. Tenant expectations have shifted, flexibility, building amenities, and clear communication about true occupancy costs matter more than ever in a competitive leasing environment. The landlords winning deals right now aren't necessarily the ones with the lowest asking rent. They're the ones being upfront about what a lease actually costs.

It isn't only large companies who need this guidance, either. A common misconception about commercial real estate is that it's only relevant to large corporations or investors. In reality, small business owners, nonprofits, and individuals navigate these same decisions regularly, often with less margin for a costly misstep.

A Deal Worth Watching: Savoy Apartments

If you want to see how Avison Young's collaborative model actually plays out, look at Savoy Apartments in Uptown Charlotte. Savoy is a 302-unit, Class A, market-rate property with ground-floor retail, roughly 8.5% of effective gross revenue, in Charlotte's Second Ward, the city's highest-performing submarket. The property is currently 96% leased, with meaningful NOI upside still ahead as the market recovers and early lease-up concessions burn off.

The sale is being led by Avison Young's Multifamily team, Angelo Donato, Steven Peden, and David Zipparo, working alongside Avison Young's U.S. Institutional Sales team, James Nelson, Erik Edeen, and Kim Troeller, with additional client expertise contributed by Jim Hanson out of Chicago. It's the kind of deal that only comes together when a firm's regional and national teams are actually talking to each other, not just sharing a logo. For Avison Young, it's a proof point of the firm's continued commitment to supporting clients in Raleigh, across North Carolina, and nationwide.

Why Raleigh

Ask Avison Young's team what makes Raleigh different from other Southeast markets, and the answer isn't a single headline number. Raleigh blends a lower cost of doing business with a highly educated workforce and strong quality of life, a combination that creates durable, long-term demand rather than short-term speculative activity.

Looking ahead, the same forces keep compounding: continued population and corporate growth, expansion in life sciences and tech, evolving office use, and infrastructure investment in roads and transit that will support further suburban and exurban commercial development. Watch downtown Raleigh, North Hills, the I-540 corridor, and the submarkets near RTP and RDU. Those are the areas drawing the most attention for commercial growth given their infrastructure and employment access.

What stands out most to the team, though, isn't a submarket or a stat. It's the people. Everyone within the real estate industry in Raleigh is always willing to help one another. There are a lot of open deals with other brokers, and the communication and relationships built throughout those deals resonate for a long time. Avison Young's team also makes a point of supporting local residential firms whenever they have commercial referrals, stepping in to assist those clients so the residential agents can stay focused on their own craft. In a business built on relationships, that kind of collaboration is what keeps a market humming.

Connect With the Team

Landlord Representation, Tenant Representation, Investment Sales, Property Management, Project Management

For leasing, investment, or advisory questions in the Raleigh market, reach out directly:

Kathy Gigac | 919.602.2660 | [email protected]

Angelo Donato | 919.995.1592 | [email protected]

Thinking about buying, selling, leasing, or repositioning a property in the Triangle? Start the conversation with Avison Young's Raleigh team before you tour a single space.

Follow @thebestofraleigh for more spotlights on the people, places, and businesses building this city's next chapter.