Andy Davis
Vice President, General Manager of Memphis
Turner Construction Co.
Davis, who started with Turner in Memphis in 2016, though he’s been working in the area since the mid-2000s, says Memphis’ construction market is busier than ever, and its level of activity has been constant
There are more major projects under construction in the city than at any time in the last 30 to 40 years, he adds, noting that Ford’s $5.6 billion BlueOval City in nearby Stanton, Tenn., has been a catalyst for the ‘activity in Memphis.
“There’s no question that when you get a major investment like this, which takes place outside of the city of Memphis, it brings a lot of other components and other parts of projects that end up coming,” Davis says. .
Other major projects that he pointed out in the city are St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, which is two years into a nearly $13 billion, six-year expansion plan that includes a more than $1 billion effort to build two 15-story towers, it has reported. the hospital
Another major project he points to is the nearly $2 billion investment by Amplify Cell Technologies, a maker of batteries for electric commercial vehicles, to build a new production facility in Byhalia, Mississippi.
The transportation industry is busy in Memphis, which is the hometown of FedEx. The shipping giant pulled permits last August for its $220 million, 1.3 million-square-foot expansion of its World Hub, according to the Memphis Business Journal. The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) is also in the midst of replacing the 75-year-old Interstate 55 bridge over the Mississippi River in Memphis, a route expected to carry 64,000 vehicles a day by 2050, to TDOT. The $800 million project was announced in July and is funded with nearly $400 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation and up to $250 million each from TDOT and the Arkansas Department of Transportation.
Even Elon Musk is taking notice, locating his xAI supercomputer campus in South Memphis, where Davis notes that the company just got approval to lease more than 500 acres at the site.
“When I first came here in 2016, there were maybe five, maybe six projects over $100 million,” Davis says.
Now the number of projects that have reached this mark is substantial, a positive development, he says.
However, Davis adds that smaller projects of less than $30 million or so have not started as quickly as usual over the past year, thanks to rising interest rates. And that has created some capacity among trade contractors, although labor shortages remain the main challenge for contractors in Memphis.
“I think that will continue to drive costs up,” he says. “We’ve seen construction costs increase … faster than other areas.”
Davis expects labor costs to continue to be a challenge as well, as Memphis is traditionally a more profitable place to do business compared to other similar areas, but as demand increases, so will pay, and therefore costs. .
“We saw that at BlueOval, where what they were paying for a plumber, a mechanic or an electrician was higher than what the going rate was,” he says. “And so the market has had to adapt to that.”
Going forward, these issues will continue to strain the industry, Davis says, as questions about interest rates and the election remain up in the air.
“I think Memphis is still in a prime spot to continue to see growth over the next three to five years.”
—Andy Davis, vice president and general manager, Memphis, Turner Construction Co.
That labor pressure, he adds, is being driven in the central US by the recent emphasis on electric vehicle manufacturing and in the Southeast by snowball data center construction.
Closer to home, higher education projects and K-12 public efforts in Shelby County, the state’s largest school system with more than 100,000 students, also continue to drive work, Davis says.
The Memphis market has also been bolstered by workforce development investments promoted by Gov. Bill Lee, such as the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, for which Turner is a contractor on two projects: TCAT Memphis and TCAT Covington .
Davis notes that other TCAT projects are in the works by other contractors.
Turner is also working on the $650 million terminal modernization project at Memphis International Airport along with Chris Woods Construction Co. and Ardmore Roderick.
“I think Memphis is still in a prime spot to continue to see growth over the next three to five years,” Davis says.
