United Community to Anchor Office Space in Greenville’s $500M Falls Park Conference District

GREENVILLE, S.C. — United Community is doubling down on downtown Greenville, positioning itself as a key office anchor in the planned $500 million Falls Park Conference District — a move that will reshape more than six acres on the east side of Falls Park into one of the city’s most ambitious mixed-use projects in decades.

The bank, which opened its $65 million, roughly 200,000-square-foot United Center headquarters at 200 E. Camperdown Way in March 2024, has agreed to sell 2.3 acres of adjacent land along Falls and Webster streets to the city of Greenville for approximately $8 million. United Community purchased those parcels for $6.3 million in May 2021, according to the Greenville County Register of Deeds, and the sale is expected to close this summer.

Rather than cashing out, the bank plans to reinvest the proceeds into two office pads within the new district, to be built atop a city-funded, partially underground parking garage with roughly 1,420 spaces serving office users, hotel guests, conference attendees and downtown visitors.

“We love this location. We love the setting. We love the proximity to downtown, and we didn’t want that to change in a negative way,” United Community chairman and CEO Lynn Harton told the Upstate Business Journal, explaining why the bank originally acquired the extra land.

What’s planned

Harton expects the first office building to total around 100,000 square feet of Class A space, giving the roughly 90 employees now working at the bank’s East Broad Street office room to consolidate near the United Center — and leaving headroom for growth. Unlike the headquarters, the new building will not include a retail branch, and without structured parking it is expected to cost less than the seven-story United Center. Design decisions, potentially with United Center architect McMillan Pazdan Smith, should firm up by year-end, with construction likely a couple of years out.

The bigger picture

Unveiled by the city in March, the Falls Park Conference District calls for a conference center, hotel, Class A office space, multifamily residential, retail, an underground garage and an expansion of Falls Park itself. Greenville-based The Furman Co. is serving as master developer through a public-private partnership, with the city, United Community, Auro Hotels and Hines among announced partners. The parking garage will be built first, and the full district is anticipated to be complete in late 2029.

For Greenville’s office market — one of the few in the country where downtown Class A demand has stayed resilient — a committed corporate anchor of United Community’s scale signals the conference district is moving from renderings toward reality.