Skanska Extends Contract on $430M Nashville Project

By Barbra Murray

Rendering of Fifth + Broadway in Nashville, Tenn.

Skanska goes all in at Fifth + Broadway, a $430 million downtown Nashville mixed-use project currently under development. The company has increased its contract with developer OM-SE, a joint venture of OliverMcMillan and Spectrum | Emery, as general contractor for the property. The contract extension is valued at $163 million, with the overall construction cost topping out at approximately $300 million.

Designed by architectural firms Gresham, Smith & Partners and Gensler, Fifth + Broadway is taking shape on the 6.2-acre former Nashville Convention Center site. As Nashville’s first mixed-use development, it has been deemed a transformative project. “Fifth + Broadway is the pivotal development for Nashville’s urban core,” former Nashville Mayor Megan Barry said in a prepared statement upon the start of construction in 2017. “We believe this project elevates the Music City brand, delivering world-class retail and entertainment, as well as the first of its kind National Museum of African American Music, all in the heart of downtown.”

In addition to the Museum, Fifth + Broadway will feature 235,000 square feet of retail and entertainment offerings, a nearly 400,000-square-foot Class A office tower at 501 Commerce St., and an approximately 400,000-square-foot tower encompassing 380 residential units. Skanska expects to complete construction in March 2020.

First quarter frenzy

The first quarter of 2018 has proven to be a busy one for Stockholm-based Skanska’s USA division, with roughly a half-dozen contracts having been announced. Within the span of just two days in January, Skanska announced it had signed on to build a two-tower, 600-unit graduate student housing property for the University of California, San Francisco for $170 million, and committed to constructing an eight-acre mixed-use project in Madisonville, Ohio, for $100 million. The company also expanded another existing contract, inking a deal to build a manufacturing facility in the Western U.S.

Appearances can be deceiving. Despite the sizeable number of contracts Skanska has secured this year, the company is not accepting contracts haphazardly. “We are more selective now. We focus very much on the contract’s conditions,” Johan Karlström, former CEO of Skanska, said during the company’s third quarter 2017 earnings conference call. “We focus very much on the location, to make sure it is a location where we have a strong organization and also a client that we know we have had good operations and we know that we have a good dialogue to work with.”

Image courtesy of Gensler