Major Greensboro developer Roy Carroll updates big local projects

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — It’s an interesting experience to scan through Forbes Magazine’s “The World’s Real-Time Billionaires” list.

The last names you would expect are all there: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Gates.

You can also narrow the list down to the oldest, youngest, women. You can also search by industry, country or a person’s name.

If you type in Roy Carroll, you’ll see (at least at this writing) $2.6 billion. He’s the world’s 1,287th richest person.

Interestingly enough, just one notch behind Carroll is the world’s 1,288th wealthiest person. A man by the name of Donald Trump (also at $2.6 billion), but perhaps that’s another story.

Needless to say, Roy Carroll’s come a long way from growing up in Greensboro, dropping out of UNC-Greensboro to take classes and study to get his real estate broker’s license, then helping his father start a homebuilding company in the early 1980s.

Today, The Carroll Companies is a multi-faceted local conglomerate that includes apartment communities, hotels, industrial development, storage facilities and more.

“We’re looking at things constantly, analyzing new ventures,” he told me during a brief recent meeting.

I was actually in The Carroll Companies’ headquarters in the 16-floor Center Pointe high rise in downtown Greensboro Carroll renovated and developed a few years back and turned into luxury condos and office space.

I was in the process of interviewing Carroll’s daughter, Madison Carroll Snyder , the company’s chief of staff and the director of a relatively new company subsidiary, Carroll Hospitality.

Getting any time with Roy Carroll is a rarity. So we quickly put a microphone on him and for the next 10 minutes or so, he updated me on some of his big recent and future Greensboro projects.

Carroll has owned and developed industrial land in the Piedmont-Triad for some 20 years. But the most significant recent tract was the one he sold to Publix to build its $400 million distribution center.

“That was a huge deal for the Triad,” he said. “That’s 2,000 jobs we built out and everything. And it’s in east Greensboro where the jobs are needed.”

But there aren’t many who’ve had more of a tangible impact on downtown Greensboro than Carroll.

In addition to Center Pointe, he built the Hyatt Place Hotel and the adjacent Carroll at Bellemeade luxury apartments across Eugene Street from the ballpark a few years back.

Today, diagonally across the Eugene Street/Bellemeade Street intersection from Hyatt Place is the site for Carroll at Parkside. The Carroll Companies calls this, at $155 million in development costs, the largest project in the history of downtown Greensboro.

It will essentially wrap around the parking deck that currently sits in the middle of the property. It will feature luxury apartments, a large meeting space, and a hotel.

“The AC Hotel (this is a Marriott brand) is going to be a fabulous hotel edition to downtown Greensboro with a rooftop restaurant,” he told me. “And it’s going to be one of the best in the area.”

The company is in the process of getting construction bids for Carroll at Parkside. But Carroll told me a completion date may depend on when the city closes streets in the area.

The city closing streets—especially Eugene— for infrastructure improvements and streetscape projects has drawn the ire of business owners in recent years. Carroll says he wants to make sure a street closing near Carroll at Parkside won’t affect business there for an extended period.

I couldn’t not ask Carroll about the abandoned and razed News & Record property a few blocks away. When I profiled Carroll eight years ago for Newsmakers, he had made an offer to buy not only that property but the newspaper itself.

“We didn’t get much of a response on that. They (Berkshire Hathaway, the property’s current owners) may regret that one day,” Carroll said with a smile.

“It was a sincere offer. But no, right now, we have our plate full downtown (with Carroll at Parkside.)

Outside of downtown, there’s the 140,000 square-foot former Macy’s department store building on Hornaday Road near Bridford Parkway, Guilford College Road, and Interstate 40. Carroll bought this place in 2022.

He’s planning another one of his Bee Safe storage facilities here along with a new concept he’s calling “Bee Cool.”

“You don’t want to buy the big freezer and have it in your house or whatever, you can lease a freezer area at Bee Cool,” he said. “We’ll have larger areas and restaurants can utilize them. It is so new, it may be a big flop. What we try to do is do them in our backyard so we can learn from those experiences.”

Carroll also plans to utilize the Hornaday Road property to expand the Car Caves concept he’s built off Battleground. Here, owners of high-end cars (like himself) can buy individual garages (or “car condos”) to store their expensive rides.

Unlike the Battleground Car Caves, the Hornaday Road facility will be a more open concept in which walls won’t separate each car.

The company is in the process of taking construction bids for the Bee Cool/Bee Safe/Car Caves project and hopes to move forward with construction this summer.

Carroll also made news before the pandemic when he bought a piece of land off West Friendly Avenue and Hobbs Road near Friendly Center. This is where another developer had hoped to build a Trader Joe’s, but neighborhood opposition killed the project.

Carroll put developing this project on hold during COVID.

“But prior to Covid, we met with the neighborhood and asked them what they’d like to see on this site,” he said. “One thing we heard was they don’t want to see big parking lots.”

So Carroll is considering some type of mixed-use, but no big apartments or big retail.

“The neighbors like restaurants,” he told me. “And we’re ready to move it forward with the next step.”

The company is in the process of consulting architects, and Carroll hopes to be ready to announce something within the next 90 days.

In the meantime, The Carroll Companies has more than $475 million in committed Triad projects on the drawing board it hopes to develop during the next few years.

“It’s our hometown. The community’s been very good to me and my family, and we want to give back,” he told me.

I doubt many people on that Forbes list have a similar interest.

To read the 2022 Forbes Magazine profile on Roy Carroll, click here . To read more about The Carroll Companies, click here.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX8 WGHP.