Changes are afoot at the 90-acres of prime real estate that Fluor has called its Greenville home.

In some ways the changes at the Haywood Mall area campus are visible.

In others they may have gone unnoticed by a public who too often drove by the construction and engineering firm’s sprawling campus and never thought twice about its sheer size or what could be done with it.

And then there are those changes that are happening right now.

Following years of lessening its Greenville operations, the Irving, Texas-based Fluor sold four of its buildings -- Centers 3 and 4, Centers 5 and 6 -- to Tempus Realty Partners, a Little Rock, Ark. firm in December of last year.

Tempus purchased the approximately 17-acre property with nearly 230,000 square feet of office space for $18.4 million and have since rebranded it as Axis Office Park. They bill it as the “largest contiguous block of office space available in Greenville.”

And with good reason.

Located at 350 and 352 Halton Road, Axis is 28,000 square feet bigger than Global Business Park and 13,000 square feet more than the Judson District Development, the two campuses immediately below it, according to the Greenville Area Development Corporation.

All three properties are well outside downtown’s boundaries, where the next two major office space offerings are the 150,000 square foot Camperdown and 106,857 square foot ONE building. And in Axis’ case, it’s this decidedly non-central business district location that could conceivable make it attractive to one or two large firms looking to open an Upstate office.  

“Fluor chose that location for a reason,” says Brantley Anderson, brokerage associate for Colliers International. “It’s the dead center of the county. The dead center of the city. It’s halfway between 385 and 85.”

The cafe at Axis Office Park | Credit: DP3

Anderson’s statements hammer home a good point: none of this new. The former Fluor Daniel campus has been a prime location for three decades. It’s just that some might say for a time we simply forgot.

Ten years ago, the Haywood Road area had lost its one-time luster, an era when the area’s most popular restaurants, retailers,and attractions lined its corridors. According to Greenville Mayor Knox White, by the late 2000s business licenses were plummeting and construction had ground to a halt.

The solution: the Haywood Road Area Master Plan, a revitalization effort that buried cables and powerlines along the strip, installed new streetlights, beautified the area, and wooed new businesses that would make Greenvillians go wow.

One need only to drive by the Cheescake Factory on a bustling evening to see if that plan worked.

“Haywood has really come back,” White says. “It’s really turned around beautifully.”

And the makeover is continuing.

Fluor may have vacated 352 Halton Road in late 2017 and will remain at 350 through August, but the company -- which has called Greenville home for more than 80 years -- is working to spiff up two of its campus properties.

“Fluor has recently made a significant investment in its Greenville, S.C. operations center and is nearing the completion of the modernization of Centre 1 and Centre 2 on the Greenville campus,” says Brett Turner, manager of global media relations for Fluor.

“We have created modern work spaces that are more conducive to collaboration and provide more efficient use of space tailored to Fluor’s global project work,” Turner adds.

The modernization of Centre 1 (Fluor moved in in 1982)  and Centre 2 (1996) should be complete in the third quarter of this year.

Then there’s Legacy Haywood, another project on land once owned by Flour.

Legacy Haywood will feature 244 1-bedroom, 2-bedroom and 3-bedroom apartment homes.

Announced in May, this luxury apartment complex is being constructed by Daniel Corporation, a real estate firm with one-time ties to Fluor and the site.

Now based in Birmingham, Ala., Daniel Corp. can trace its lineage to Daniel Construction Company, which was founded by Charles Daniel in Greenville in 1935. Four decades later, Daniel Construction merged with Flour Corporation, making the partnership one of the engineering and construction world’s largest. In 1986, the real estate arm spun off into its own private firm.

Legacy Haywood is the second complex from Daniel on former Fluor property. Daniel bought what would be Haywood Reserve in 2014 and sold the completed luxury apartments in 2017. Legacy is adjacent to Reserve; combined they occupy 26 acres.

“Given our history, we had strong familiarity with the location,” says Justin Weintraub, executive vice president with Daniel, nothing that Legacy’s name is a tribute to the company’s Greenville beginnings.

When Daniel first began looking at the area, Weintraub says, they took notice of the “broader redevelopment of the Haywood corridor, anchored by Fluor’s campus, Haywood Mall, and the Patewood Medical Campus.”

“These drivers, along with the great access just off I-385, halfway between downtown and the Woodruff Road destinations, gave us confidence a luxury for-rent residential community would be successful,” he adds. “Haywood Reserve’s performance proved our thesis to be correct, and in many ways, exceeded our expectations.”

Speaking of expectations, the Swamp Rabbit Trail will hopefully reach the Fluor campus in the near future, Mayor White says, connecting offices and residents to the same revitalization engine that turned Travelers Rest into a booming suburb.

“If anybody had any doubts of the economic value of the trail beyond the recreation, there is no doubt anymore,” White says.

Only time will tell if some of that Swamp Rabbit magic will make its way to Halton Road.