Family in Kiawah, feet in the sand, saltwater cowgirl roots fully activated. Slower week on purpose.

The low country has a way of reminding you that not everything needs to move fast. Some things just need to be right.

That said — Issue 03 has a lot going on. I've been digging into what Duke Energy is quietly building across the Upstate and what that infrastructure means for the next wave of development opportunities. Spoiler: the cranes aren't the story. The substations are.

There's also a 1031 exchange that fell apart at the one-yard line — not because of price, but because of sequencing. It's a lesson worth reading before it costs you a deal.

The Lazy Broker Award makes its triumphant return. Greer makes his newsletter debut. And Scout — now nearly three weeks into Greenville — has earned a full report.

Let's get into it.

Bird dogging land is the job nobody sees.

Before I left for Kiawah, I spent the better part of a morning driving parcels for a developer I work with. Not pulling comps. Not scheduling tours. Actually going — red clay roads, windows down, notepads out.

A parcel came across my desk listed at nearly $300,000 an acre. On the surface it looked defensible. Surrounding land was listed in that range.

It wasn't.

No sewer. No city plans to extend lines to the area. The comps the listing broker used weren't closed sales — they were active listings that had been sitting for over a year. Shovel-ready lots for a developer that were cleared, permitted, with full ingress and egress available.

His parcel still had timber. No clearing. No legal access point. The city would never approve a curb cut on the highway it fronted. To even get to the land you'd need to acquire a sliver of an adjoining parcel just to create an entrance.

Real value — closer to $65,000 an acre.

I wrote the listing broker a short, direct email walking through every variable. Not to embarrass anyone. To move the needle. He can take that to his seller as honest market feedback. The seller isn't taking a haircut. The buyer isn't getting a discount. The land was just never properly priced from the beginning.

There's a real dance in this business between educating sellers, buyers, and sometimes other brokers. Orchestrate all three — and get a deal under contract that everyone else walked away from because they didn't spend thirty minutes on the why — and you'll have a very long career.

The homework is the job.

The 1031 that got away — and the sequencing mistake that cost it.

A client of mine had a clean window to execute a 1031 exchange into an off-market Dollar General in Travelers Rest. NNN lease. Passive income. The kind of deal that doesn't come up often and moves fast when it does.

We had a five-day head start before it hit any broader exposure. That's the advantage off-market gives you — time. And we gave it back.

Instead of getting under contract and working the details through due diligence — the way this is done — my client wanted everything resolved upfront. Lease terms, environmental, title questions, tenant financials. All of it. Before signing.

By the time he was comfortable, another buyer had already closed the gap with an all-cash offer and a tighter timeline. We offered list price. Didn't matter.

Here's the sequencing rule that never changes: get under contract first. Use due diligence to get comfortable. Negotiate from inside the contract, not outside it.

The 1031 clock is still running. The search continues. And next time, we sign first.

The Upstate is becoming a data center corridor. The question nobody is asking is where the power comes from.

TigerDC's $3 billion Project Spero is slated for Spartanburg County. Cielo Digital Infrastructure just committed $2.1 billion in Cherokee County. NorthMark already has its first data hall coming online on South Pine Street in Spartanburg. Airsys — which we covered in Issue 02 — planted a global headquarters in Woodruff specifically to build cooling systems for this exact infrastructure.

That's billions of dollars of capital landing within 45 minutes of each other.

The story most people are following is the announcements. The story worth following is the power grid.

Duke Energy is planning to add 14 gigawatts of capacity across its service territory by 2031 — a $103 billion capital plan, the largest in the regulated utility industry. The majority flows directly to grid infrastructure and new generation to keep up with data center demand. Upstate SC customers are already seeing rate increases to fund it.

Here's the play: the land that sits near new Duke Energy transmission lines and substation expansion is going to be very interesting in the next 36 months. Data centers need massive, reliable power. They build where it exists or where it's coming. That infrastructure doesn't appear on any listing platform.

Stop watching the cranes. Start watching where Duke Energy is pulling permits.

SC just passed the Data Center Development Act. Here's what it actually does.

South Carolina passed S.867 — the Data Center Development Act — which creates a framework for permitting, tax incentives, and utility coordination for large-scale data center development across the state.

The headline benefit: qualifying data centers get a sales tax exemption on equipment and a streamlined permitting process. For a facility spending hundreds of millions on servers and cooling infrastructure, that exemption is real money.

The part worth watching: the bill ties utility coordination directly to the permitting process, meaning Duke Energy and Dominion are now formally in the room when large data center projects are approved. That's not a small thing. It means power availability becomes a gating factor on development approval — which in turn means the areas with existing grid capacity just became significantly more valuable.

If you're looking at land in the Upstate corridor, knowing where Duke's infrastructure is heading isn't optional anymore. It's the job.

This week's award goes to the broker who scheduled a site tour for a client, confirmed the address the night before, and then drove 40 minutes to the wrong property.

Not the wrong unit. The wrong property. Different street. Different city.

The listing was still technically in the same county, so partial credit for geographic awareness.

The client waited in the parking lot for 25 minutes before calling. The broker, to his credit, arrived with coffee and an explanation that remains unclear to everyone involved.

The tour was rescheduled. The coffee was appreciated. The deal is pending.

We are all rooting for you.

Meet Greer. Eleven years old. German Shorthaired Pointer. Bird dog by trade, couch occupant by current circumstance.

Greer had two mass removals this week. He came through surgery like the old veteran he is — dignified, unbothered, and immediately plotting his return to the bed he has claimed as his own for over a decade.

Scout handled all of it. Every appointment. Pre-op, post-op, the drive home, the cone fitting, the updates. Solo — while I was in Kiawah and while she was simultaneously trying to sort out a Land Rover Disco II that chose this particular week to develop opinions about running.

She sent photos throughout. Every single step.

Nearly three weeks into Greenville and she has already become the kind of person this town runs on — the one who shows up, handles what needs handling, and doesn't make a production out of any of it.

Greer is recovering. The Rover is being assessed. Scout is unfazed.

That's the report.

In 1954, Duke Power — now Duke Energy — energized the first unit of its Keowee-Toxaway hydroelectric project in Oconee County, beginning what would become one of the most significant power infrastructure buildouts in South Carolina history.

Seventy years later, the company is still the one deciding where growth goes.

Infrastructure is destiny. The lesson holds.

See you next week.

— Haley

The Upstate Brief · theupstatebrief.com · Haley Stephens · Upstate SC · Since 2026 Reply anytime. Haley reads every one.