Kyle Keene was a college student when he found inspiration to ultimately launch two major, high-end residential projects in downtown Greenville.

Keene is the founder of Keene Development Group, the company developing the much anticipated luxury townhomes – The McDaniel and Biltmore Walk.

The designs for both The McDaniel and Biltmore Walk are influenced by New York City projects and utilize blends of Parisian architecture, limestone, and brick exteriors to imitate some of the big city features – bringing something relatively new to the Upstate South Carolina area.

Keene is a Greenville native who spent nearly a decade working in the luxury condominium and multi-family space in New York City before returning here in 2020.

It was an article that he’d read in The Real Deal, a real-estate focused publication based in New York City, that fueled his interest and pursuit into real estate development. He saw it as “a really unique career path.”

Keene was approaching his junior year at The Citadel when he read that article, which focused on ways young developers could make it without having capital to that extent of their own.

But he got what he deems his real splash, his inside view into development in Greenville in more of the urban focus, while interning during summer break of his senior year with Bo Aughtry, also a graduate of The Citadel as well as chairman and CEO of Windsor/Aughtry Co., a leading commercial real estate and brokerage firm based Greenville.

“After that, I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” he said.

He’d planned to move to New York for grad school and pursue a master’s in real estate development. Instead, he stayed at The Citadel and obtained his MBA.

Afterward, he sold his 2005 Jeep Wrangler, which gave him four to six months to move to New York and land a job or “I would have to come back to South Carolina.”

He got a job working for Eric Brody, principal of Anax Real Estate Partners, a capital advisory and development firm in New York City. Brody was a one of the young developers featured in The Real Deal article that sparked Keene’s career interest, which is why Keene reached out to him.

“Anyone willing to take the risk in order to meet with me, I’m gonna meet with,” Brody said in a telephone interview.

“I have no preconceived notion as to what the candidate coming to me will be able to provide. When I sat down with him (Keene) and you look at what his background was, I prefer people who have grit rather than people who have a higher education in general, because we can teach the actual skill set in construction and development, but we cannot teach durability to be ambitious and to be able to have determination and drive. Within him, I just saw somebody that would do what it takes in order to learn because he’s already capable of overcoming adversity.”

Brody’s company was developing luxury condos primarily, and rentals here and there, when Keene began working for him.

“But he had three projects going on at the time – all condos – and he threw me into the construction side heavy,” Keene said. “He wanted me to learn that as much as possible because he told me that if I could learn all that, the financing is easy. You can read about that.”

During the day, Keene worked on the construction side, alongside the superintendent and the project manager more than anything else.

“At night, I would just do what I could on my own to practice the finance side,” he said.

Among the New York City projects Keene is proud to have worked on is on 201 E. 79th St. It was the last project in the city where he worked on the construction side and it involved an existing 300,000-square-foot, fully occupied building.

“We replaced existing white glazed brick with the first of its kind porcelain facade in NYC,” he said. “The facade alone was over 100,000 square feet, and it was met with the challenges of Covid, which we kept working through NYC’s requirements and accomplished something that was never done to this extent in NYC.”

Another project there was at 117 W. 21st St. This was Keene’s first exposure to a ground-up luxury condo development.

“I had zero experience and had to learn by fire,” he said. “This experience really forced me to learn and to keep up at a pace you only see in NYC, or I would be gone.

“It stands out because that project was my first real taste of the expectations of that market, and I was exposed to experiences unique to that market,” Keene said.

“Kyle is a very determined young man and heavily disciplined in the real estate development and construction business, meaning that it’s not about working hard, it’s about executing and completing a task because a building is not built with 99 percent effort. It’s binary,” Brody said. “It either got done or it didn’t, and with Kyle on our team, we were able to execute multiple projects because he understood that philosophy, which he’s probably carried with him up into his tenure of his own business, which was always inevitable based on his mentality.”

In New York City, preserving the buildings and an appreciation of the architecture are really important, Keene said.

The passion for raw materials used there, which are more costly but make a longer lasting and higher-quality product, will be showcased in Keene’s projects.

“I would say the things we are doing you can definitely see the New York flavor in it, which is the limestone accents,” he said. “The interiors are Italian influences you can only see in upper New York and access, I mean down to the hardwoods.”

Every condo building in New York is expected to have the highest level of quality, Keene said.

“So, I think once the McDaniel is done, I think it (the New York flavor) is going to be really obvious.  I think it’s going to be something that I don’t think anyone’s ever seen in a development scale,” he said. “It will be custom home-finish scale, but definitely the architecture is what really rubbed off on me from New York.”

Keene was in Greenville visiting family in early 2020, with no intention of staying, when he reconnected with an acquaintance he’d known since middle school. Keene and that acquaintance, Greenville native Whitney Trexler, dated and endured Covid together that year in Greenville. They got married in 2021.

The couple considered making a life together in New York, but “I just had a bad taste in my mouth at that point with everything going on, and I just liked the quality of life I was experiencing in Greenville, so I decided to stay here, and she appreciates that too,” Keene said.

Keene had a short stint with a local developer before deciding to launch his own company.

“I found this opportunity, messed with it for a short bit,” he said. “I would say in about a year, I pulled the trigger and decided to go on my own.”

Shortly thereafter, he took on the challenge of The McDaniel, which consists of six properties off McDaniel Avenue with “the worst grade probably possible.”

“It’s a pretty big slope,” Keene said. “I think it was really overlooked by developers. I think a few had tried before.”

After putting together the first two parcels, Keene reached out to one of the neighbors and secured another one. A connection with attorneys from The Citadel led to an offer for him to buy more parcels. Not only did the project require the piecing together of multiple parcels, but several structures had to be demolished.

“It was really challenging piecing that together as it took a while but the actual challenge came to making the site functional and livable, and working with the city to get a street through there,” he said. “We went condo for that reason so we could have the density to make the project make sense on a financial level but also to have some of the flexible access and egress from the site.

Construction cost for The McDaniel is approximately $26 million. 

New soils have to be brought onto the site and they had to be stabilized to lessen the slope.

In May, the construction crew finished its last challenge of the topography aspects with the installation of a 25-foot retaining wall to hold that soil. That wall won’t be visible because the soil will be flush with it, but “right there should give some indication of how much soil we had to bring in, the challenges involved with that.”

Phase one of The McDaniel will have 10 vertical units, while phase two will have 20. The units range from $1.85 million to about $2.25 million.

Construction cost for Biltmore Walk is approximately $40 million. The Biltmore Walk site was vacant, but required Keene to acquire several contingent parcels around it.

Crews will break ground on this 44-unit luxury townhome project in the Alta Vista neighborhood this year.

Biltmore Walk will be different from The McDaniel, Keene said. It will have a brick design with lime accents, in part, to fit in with the neighborhood and the area it’s in.

With The McDaniel, “I felt like it had to be a statement piece where it’s located at McBee coming into downtown,” Keene said.

In addition to The McDaniel and Biltmore Walk, Keene Development Group is doing some interior re-design work in the Kimpton Hotel residences.

“We actually came on the project after it was already kind of taken down the road for a few years,” Keene said. “We have spent a lot of time making some small changes that are going to make a big impact on how the project functions as well as in how the lobby looks

“The interiors have been changed completely, giving it a more higher-end feel, and we’ve gotten a lot of good partners entering,” he said. “Hopefully there will be some announcements on that soon.”