The Pepsi plant is finally moving.
The vacant bottling facility at 1450 Meeting Street sold on June 26 for $13.5 million to Catalyst Development Partners, an Atlanta multifamily developer making its first acquisition in South Carolina.
Quick math on that number. White Point Partners, a Charlotte investment firm, bought the property for $8 million in 2020 during peak COVID uncertainty. They held it six years, took a redevelopment plan to the city, never built anything, and walked away with a $5.5 million gain.
"When Erik and I acquired 1450 Meeting Street during the uncertainty of COVID, we saw far more than a single asset," co-founder Jay Levell said in the Post & Courier. "We believed Charleston's long-term growth would ultimately reward that vision."
It did. That's the upper peninsula in a sentence.
Catalyst has its own version of the plan, and it's already further along than White Point's ever got. The firm went before the city's Design Review Board on April 6 with a concept: two one-story retail buildings fronting Meeting Street, and a five-story residential building behind them with more than 300 units.
The board approved it unanimously, with notes.
They want Catalyst to look at Cormac, the seven-story brick project down the road, for design cues. They flagged the back wing as too close to the lot line. And they raised the cemetery.
The existing bottling plant sits right on the property line next to it. Staff asked that whatever replaces it, which will be considerably taller, back off out of respect. Reasonable ask.
Some context on the corridor. Pepsi occupied that warehouse from the 1960s until the 2020 sale, then moved out to Palmetto Commerce Park in North Charleston. What filled in around it since is a different city: The Quin office building next door, The Refinery, breweries, restaurants, Cormac.
Three hundred apartments is a real number for that stretch. It's also market-rate, which in 2026 Charleston means what it means.
Catalyst isn't stopping here either. Andrew Batkins of Woodlock Capital, who brokered the sale, said the firm already has a North Charleston site under contract and plans more across the tri-county. They're active in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
"1450 Meeting Street sits within one of Charleston's most important urban growth corridors," Batkins said. "The transaction reflects continued investor conviction in Charleston's long-term fundamentals."
Translation: out-of-state capital still likes this city a lot.
The upper peninsula has spent a decade being described as about to happen. At some point the buildings go up and it just happened.
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