Carter, T5 Join to Develop Data Centers

ATLANTA-In a plan to enter the data centers and mission critical facilities market, locally based commercial real estate firm Carter has formed a strategic alliance with T5 Partners LLC. The Atlanta-based firm specializes in development and services of data, contact and mission critical facilities. The alliance plans to construct data centers across the country in strategic locations that meet the needs of corporate America, says Pete Marin, president of T5 Partners.

“We’ve known each other for 15 years and have worked together in the past,” Scott Taylor, president of Carter, says of his partnership with Marin’s firm. “We talked about pursuing opportunities jointly and thought there would be fortuitous chances for us to partner while allowing T5 to maintain their own brand and autonomy and leverage the platform we have at Carter. This allows us to align with a very experienced group of technically sound professionals within a segment in the market we had not been effective in as we’d like.”

The alliance will offer end-to-end solutions for specialized high-tech real estate needs. As of now, the partnership does not have any plans as to how many projects it will look to undertake, but hopes to stay ahead of the sector of mission-critical facilities, Marin tells GlobeSt.com. “What we’re seeing is demand is continuing to out-top supply and that imbalance is expected to be in place for the next three to five years.”

Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies have the biggest need for data centers, he explains, and usually have three data centers; a primary, a backup and disaster recovery facility. “We want to position ourselves to capture two of those,” he says.

Developments will range from about 150,000 square feet up to 300,000 square feet, with 150 to 300 watts per square foot. On the low end, the projects can be valued at approximately $40 million, while some on the higher end can go up to $500 million to $1 billion, reveals Marin. The firms will pursue both speculative and build-to-suit opportunities within those parameters. The newly formed alliance is also looking to get into the medical arena and will pursue that as well, he adds, referencing the industry’s transference of medical records from paper to digital files.

T5 has two projects currently under way in Charlotte, NC where aspects of the alliance with Carter will be involved, says Marin. The firm’s T5 Charlotte Region Data Center Park has an existing 150,000-square-foot powered data center shell on 113 acres. The firm’s other data center park is in Kings Mountain and consists of 215,600 square feet on 85 acres of developable land.