Charlotte Feasibility Studies

Chester, Lancaster and York are as much a part of the register's Charlotte market as Mecklenburg is. The Census Bureau's Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro area joins them to Anson, Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln, Mecklenburg, Rowan and Union in North Carolina, and the coastal Charleston market is a separate South Carolina metro. In the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate, the eleven counties held 1,076,260 households, 709,351 of them owners and 366,909 renters, with a median household income of $83,304 and a median value of owner-occupied homes of $356,400 ¹⁵. The SBA counts in the lenders section are drawn on the same eleven counties.

The payroll series covers the same two-state area. Nonfarm jobs stood at 1,387.2 thousand in August 2025 and 1,408.6 thousand in August 2026, up 21.4 thousand, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' table of large metropolitan areas ³.

The city of Charlotte is the part of the metro area with a count of its own. Its gain of 20,731 residents in the year to July 2025 was the largest numeric gain of any U.S. city in the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 city and town release ², and QuickFacts puts the city at 964,784 people in 2025 against 874,708 in 2020 ¹. The two counts describe the city alone; the metro area's eleven counties carry no 2025 headcount on this page.

Apartments: the third-largest pipeline, read by two brokers

Matthews ranks Charlotte's apartment pipeline behind only Miami and Nashville among U.S. markets in Q1 2026, and places its concentrations in North Charlotte, Southwest Charlotte, and Huntersville and Cornelius ⁷. The rank sets Charlotte against other U.S. markets; it is not itself a unit count. MMG counts 14,963 units completed and 14,058 absorbed over the four quarters to Q2 2026 ⁸. Acren's tabulation of Census Building Permits Survey data shows 5,820 units permitted in structures of five or more homes in calendar 2025 ⁶, and Matthews counted 958 units started in Q1 2026 ⁷. Each of those four counts belongs to its own publisher and period: Acren's to permits in buildings of five or more homes over a calendar year, Matthews' to one quarter's starts, and MMG's to completions and absorption in its own Charlotte inventory over four quarters.

On occupancy the two brokers part ways. Matthews reports vacancy 0.1 point lower in Q1 2026 than a year earlier ⁷. MMG's Q2 2026 report has occupancy down 70 basis points, a change whose comparison period the record does not give ⁸. Falling vacancy means rising occupancy, so one reading has the market tightening and the other loosening, and they do not agree. Matthews also reports an asking rent of $1,516 in Q1 2026, with annual rent change negative for the 11th consecutive quarter ⁷. Median gross rent across the metro area's eleven counties was $1,473 in the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate ¹⁵, a median for renter-occupied units paying cash rent.

A Charlotte multifamily feasibility pro forma that trends rent upward in its first years starts against that run of annual declines.

Hotels: a stock count and a leisure count

County Business Patterns counted 434 establishments classed as hotels (except casino hotels) and motels across the eleven counties in 2023, with 10,293 employees ¹⁴. The CRVA impact report, as Axios summarized it, counted 473,000 leisure room nights in fiscal 2025 ⁵. No published Charlotte hotel occupancy, average daily rate, RevPAR or room pipeline was found, and nothing on record counts the business, group or event nights a hotel feasibility study adds to the leisure figure. The 2023 establishment count and the fiscal 2025 room nights each keep their own period here and are not combined.

Short-term rentals: one vendor rate

AirDNA's data for Charlotte, NC put the short-term rental average daily rate at $167 over the 12 months to August 2026 ⁹. It is a vendor reading over a trailing year, so it moves from month to month and is cited with the month it was read. North Carolina's statute on local rental registration is set out on our state page.

Self-storage: staffed locations, not space

For self-storage, the register supplies the only Charlotte figure: County Business Patterns counted 184 establishments classed as lessors of miniwarehouses and self-storage units across the eleven counties in 2023 ¹⁴. It counts establishments, meaning locations with paid employees, not every facility. It gives no rentable square feet or occupancy, and the research found no storage supply series of its own for Charlotte.

Older residents across two states

The metro area's eleven counties held 398,728 residents aged 65 and over in the 2020 to 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimate ¹⁵. The adult care licensing and Certificate of Need rules on the North Carolina page are North Carolina law, and three of those eleven counties, Chester, Lancaster and York, are in South Carolina. An assisted living study in one of those three starts from South Carolina's licensing position.

Coded to the county of each project, the SBA's FOIA files hold 3,775 loans approved in fiscal years 2016 to 2025, net of cancellations, for projects in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro area, carrying $2,448.7 million of 7(a) credit ¹³. Debenture lending under 504 reached the same eleven counties at $318.1 million approved in fiscal years 2016 to 2025, net of cancellations ¹³. Neither total stops at the state line.

GoSBALoans, a private ranking built from the agency's loan files rather than an SBA release, counts 1,096 7(a) loans for $942 million in what it calls the Charlotte 7(a) market from fiscal 2020 to June 2025 ¹⁰. Its list of the most active lenders runs in loan-count order, and BayFirst heads it with 79 loans; Live Oak made 68 loans but is top by dollar volume at $82.04 million, and Huntington lent $26.88 million ¹⁰. The register count above covers ten fiscal years and eleven counties, and the GoSBALoans count covers fiscal 2020 to June 2025 in its own Charlotte market, so neither is a share of the other.

The SBA's North Carolina District Office is in Charlotte and covers the state's counties ¹⁷. In SBA Ledger's statewide ranking of certified development companies for fiscal 2021 to 2025, Business Expansion Funding Corp. (BEFCOR) of Charlotte stands first and Carolina Business Capital, also of Charlotte, third ¹⁸. SBA Ledger builds that ranking from the agency's own FOIA files, the same records behind the register counts, but sums five fiscal years statewide rather than ten for these eleven counties.

The SBA's own rule on studies is 13 CFR 120.160(b): SBA may require professional appraisals, a survey, or a feasibility study ¹⁶. What the study then has to prove is set out under our SBA 7(a) and 504 practice.