Capitol Broadcasting looks to real estate amid a changing media landscape.
While real estate’s longstanding rule is “location, location, location,” another mantra holds just as true for all businesses: “diversification, diversification, diversification.”
Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Co. is putting both creeds on the fast track with plans for stepping up its real estate development. The almost 90-year-old company veered sharply from its radio and television legacy in 1991, buying the Triple-A Durham Bulls minor league baseball team and ballpark. A decade later, it developed the adjacent, 1-million-square-foot American Tobacco Campus in long-empty cigarette factories.
Now, 25 years later, with almost 3 million square feet of real estate in its portfolio, Capitol plans to develop at least two projects a year in either North Carolina or South Carolina.
“We created a specific development division about a year ago that has a core and sole focus on the sourcing and development,” says Michael Goodmon, the CBC executive vice president who leads the real estate and sports divisions. “We are trying to do things that will add new sources of revenue and new opportunities for the company.”
The company that built its profits on local news broadcasts faces shrinking audiences and seemingly endless competing platforms. A Pew Research report found 3.1 million people nationally watched the local evening news of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates in 2022, down from 4.1 million people nationwide in 2016.
WRAL broadcasts both Fox and NBC affiliates in the Triangle region, which is the 22nd largest U.S. media market. It’s the only independent owner of an ABC, CBS or NBC affiliate in the top 25 markets.
“It’s one of the very few locally-owned stations left in the country,” says Charlie Tuggle, who leads the broadcast journalism program at UNC Chapel Hill. “They don’t have to listen to a corporation. They get to run their own ship.”
The station remains strong, he adds. WRAL has 143 employees, The Assembly website reported in a September story that cited the departures of about a dozen veteran station employees over the past two or three years. Jimmy Goodmon told the website the station has more news staffers than 10 years ago and is reinvesting in its media business, unlike most larger national firms.
“Maybe they don’t have the viewers they had in the past, but all of the stations have really branched out into more of the digital content,” Tuggle says.
That local ownership “is really important to us and allows us to be flexible,” says Jimmy Goodmon, 49, who succeeded his father, Jim Goodmon, as CEO in May. He is Michael’s older brother by three years. “We run our company differently from a lot of broadcasters that are just broadcasters. We love that part of our business but we also do other things.”
Boomtown Bet
CBC Real Estate’s expanding lineup includes Overlook on Main in Holly Springs in south Wake County. The project is breaking ground early this year with plans for 237 apartments and retail space, including two rooftop restaurants across from Ting Stadium, home of the Holly Springs Salamanders. CBC purchased the amateur baseball team, which plays in the collegiate summer Coastal Plan League, in 2019.
It’s not a rule, but CBC leans toward developing real estate that’s tied to sports. It’s developed four projects since the American Tobacco Campus.
* The 300,000-square-foot Rocky Mount Mills, which opened in 2018, is adjacent to the municipally-owned Rocky Mount Sports Complex. It has more than 20 courts and fields.
* In 2021, CBC Real Estate and Chapel Hill-based East West Partners developed Bandwidth’s 530,000-square-foot corporate headquarters in west Raleigh, near the Lenovo Center, where the Carolina Hurricanes and NC State University’s men’s basketball play.
* The 165,000-square-foot MoJud Lofts opened in 2024 in a former textile mill in Greensboro with 173 apartments next to First Horizon Coliseum, the city’s main arena.
* The Thread, a 200,000-square-foot complex with office and retail, opened in 2024 next to Rock Hill, South Carolina’s Sports & Event Center, which has 24 basketball and volleyball courts. CBC developed the former textile mill with The Keith Corp., Springsteen Properties and Springs Creative.
Still, there’s no set formula for success, Michael Goodmon says.
“The similarities between American Tobacco and Holly Springs, and I’m rounding up here: none. You can’t take a cookie-cutter approach to a community. Real estate is, at the end of the day, a pretty local game. The care of that region and the area you’re working in is important to the outcome of the project.”
One of the biggest differences is the risk factor. Holly Springs, which had fewer than 1,000 residents in 1990, is a boomtown.
“You can do a Google search on economic development and be stunned by what’s happening in Holly Springs,” he says. The town’s population of 49,000 has doubled since 2010 and grown by 19% in the past four years, according to Nathan Dollar, director of Carolina Demography, a unit of UNC Chapel Hill.
That isn’t what Durham looked like when American Tobacco opened.
“I started with CBC 17 years ago [in 2008]. At the time, there was one restaurant on Main Street in the heart of downtown. Today, there are restaurants with James Beard-award winning or nominated chefs all over the place,” says Mark Stanford, CBC vice president of real estate. “It was in no way, shape or form what it is now and I think people lose sight
of that.”
Jimmy Goodmon was in his 20s when his father bought the long-vacant tobacco facility. He recalls trees growing inside and remnants left behind by police officers using the buildings for mock tactical maneuvers.
“There were canisters of tear gas on the ground,” he says. “I was like ‘Dad, what are we doing?’” The elder Goodmon had visions of boosting his baseball team and the city of Durham.
“A founding principle of my father’s is that the success of the community is paramount to the success of the company,” says Michael Goodmon, who donned a Durham Bulls pullover in a recent interview. “Community growth is company growth.”
“Everybody has to win,” Jimmy Goodmon adds. “The community has to want it. The government has to want the project. The private entity doing the development needs to want the project.”
CBC owns 13 TV and radio stations that broadcast mostly around the Triangle and Wilmington areas. Holding an existing stake in numerous communities gives CBC Real Estate an edge over national developers, the Goodmons believe.
Though four CBC developments have been in historic buildings, that’s not its focus
moving forward.
“The opportunity for historic tax credits are few and far between in this state and any state really and they are very complicated,” Jimmy Goodmon says.
“We looked at the environment and said ‘Let’s open up a development arm in our real estate division that can go out and take our expertise and deliver it with other partners.’
“We’re expanding into all of North Carolina, which we feel very comfortable with. This is where we have worked and played our whole lives.”
Having started at WRAL studios as teenagers, the Goodmons are experienced at answering to the public on various levels. While working in WRAL at age 20, Jimmy recalls taking a call from an angry woman. “She’s mad, yelling at me because she doesn’t like what the lady in ‘The Young and the Restless’ is wearing.”
Hot and Spicy
In the state rated tops for business by CNBC and others, Holly Springs is a key beneficiary as life science companies Fujifilm Diosynth, Amgen and others collectively make billions of dollars of investments.
Michael Dayton and his wife are among those moving in. They left north Raleigh five years ago for a smaller town that they considered safer for their children. The couple also wanted to find a better house for less money.
“We drove 27 hours over four weekends looking at places from Wake Forest to Holly Springs,” he says on a recent night while visiting The Blind Pelican Seafood House. A wooded residential lot and numerous parks were high on their wish list. The couple landed on Holly Springs and a home in the Twelve Oaks golf community.
“We bought in the mid $600s, and now it would cost about $1.2 million,” Dayton says.
The often-crowded Blind Pelican speaks to the growth of Holly Springs. The restaurant between downtown and Ting Stadium is known for its beachy decor, seafood and over-the-top bloody marys.
An entry level drink generously accented with bacon and vegetables costs $11.50. But on many a Saturday, bartenders fill close to 100 orders of the $100 Medusa, which sprouts a lobster tail, crab legs, bacon and skewers filled with shrimp and a 6-ounce filet mignon.
In August, a group from Texas set the Guinness World Record for “most expensive bloody mary,” ringing up a pre-planned $8,887 cocktail at the Blind Pelican.
“You can walk around the restaurant and there’s somebody who flew in from Texas and somebody who flew in from Maine. Somebody was here last week from Alaska,” says Nikki Stafford, who opened the bar in 2019 with her husband Andrew. They started the My Way Tavern there in 2010.
“The population was around 14,000 people then. When we got our loan, we qualified for it because we were (bringing business) to a rural area,” Stafford says, laughing. As more residents came to Holly Springs, so did chain restaurants. The Staffords worked with an executive chef to develop a more distinctive menu.
“The people of Holly Springs get tired of driving to Cary for a good meal. We’ve seen tremendous growth. You can see all the traffic driving down the street. It’s good for business,” she says, adding that the downtown has flourished with new residents
and demands.
The demand for more restaurants will only continue as large corporations fill thousands of jobs in Holly Springs.
* San Francisco-based Genentech is building a $700 million facility that is expected to add 400 manufacturing jobs. It will make metabolic and weightloss medicines, starting in 2029.
* Switzerland-based Ypsomed is investing $195 million in its first North American manufacturing facility, creating 62 jobs. It produces injection systems for self-administered liquid medicine.
* UK-based Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies opened a $3.2 billion facility in September and has hired more than 650 workers as of November. It will make injectable drugs with cells grown in three-story bioreactors.
* California-based biotech giant Amgen is investing $1 billion to expand its existing $500 million plant. The company expects to employ 725 people there by 2032.
“We’re really excited about this market with so much potential. The flood gates are open there,” says Stanford. Owning the Salamanders is an important precursor to Overlook
on Main.
“You watch and understand how people interact with the community asset,” he says.
“You craft the real estate around that.”
Shapeshifting
While the Holly Springs boom should aid Overlook on Main’s prospects, other CBC real estate developments have had more difficult starts.
CBC bought the Durham Bulls thirty-five years ago with plans to move the team to a Triangle Central Park area that Jim Goodmon and other leaders envisioned near the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Michael Goodmon recalls. The goal was to promote regionalism, countering the tradition of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill operating independently.
The collaborative idea fizzled, leaving CBC with an aging venue next to abandoned cigarette plants. The company pivoted and created American Tobacco Campus. It now has several dozen tenants that together employ 4,000-plus people.
“We kind of started with the hardest thing we could possibly do,” Michael Goodmon says. Tenants include restaurants, tech firms, Durham Tech’s Culinary Arts Program and the American Underground workspace for startups.
Cristo Rey Research Triangle High School opened in 2021. Nearly 400 students, many who are first in their family to graduate high school, attend classes four days a week and work one day for employers such as Cisco, Wolfspeed, NC State and Empire Properties. The first graduating class in May had a 100% college acceptance and collectively received $10 million in scholarships.
CBC didn’t initially envision a school or tech incubator as tenants. “We have to be shapeshifters in what we are trying to be,” Michael Goodmon says. “You have to look at new things and experiments as experiments.”
Rocky Mount Mills, which includes apartments and retail sites, has had a longer path to profitability. “It was really hard, extremely risky, and remains hard and risky to this day — it was an important project for us, and to be honest, it’s a project that is not highly replicable,” says Stanford.
CBC expects its new projects will both benefit their communities and have a shorter path to boosting the bottom line.
Starting this month, CBC is leasing and managing the municipally-owned Five County Stadium in Zebulon in western Wake County. Its plan for revamping the former home of the former Carolina Mudcats baseball team led to a 10-year contract with Wake County.
“Our sports division is focused on how to maximize the sports venue itself,” says Michael Goodmon. “Zebulon is also a high-growth area. The opportunity is high.” ■
