CRE Permanent in Raleigh

Three institutions that can't pack up and leave. Raleigh is the North Carolina state capital, home to the General Assembly and the executive agencies. NC State (40,503 students), UNC-Chapel Hill (34,099), and Duke (about 16,600) anchor three counties. Research Triangle Park is 7,000 acres of unincorporated land, home to more than 300 companies employing roughly 55,000 workers, and state law bars any municipality from annexing inside it. That combination, a capital, three universities, and a protected research park, doesn't exist anywhere else in USA Mortgage's markets. We don't have cap-rate or vacancy data to size the opportunity, so we underwrite the tenant and the lease in front of us rather than a market average.

Yes, and it's the counter-cyclical floor under the whole MSA. State government payrolls in the Raleigh-Cary MSA ran 55,300 as of May 2026, about 7.1% of the metro's 783,900 total nonfarm jobs, and health care and social assistance added another 96,400 in the same period. Unemployment sat at 3.1% for Raleigh-Cary in June 2026, below North Carolina's 3.6% statewide rate. That's not a promise the underlying real estate performs, but it's a labor base that doesn't move with a single employer's decision or a single industry's cycle.

Materially, and you can't blend the three counties. A Raleigh address in Wake County pays a combined $0.9091 per $100 of assessed value for tax year 2026 (county $0.5371 plus city $0.3720). The three counties only line up on the fiscal 2025-2026 table, and there Raleigh ran $0.8721, Durham County plus the city of Durham $0.9913, about 14% more, and Chapel Hill in Orange County $1.1383, about 30% more than Raleigh on the same value. Wake revalued effective 2024-01-01 and revalues again 2027-01-01; Durham and Orange both revalued 2025-01-01, at materially higher rates, and their forward revaluation cycles are not published. There's no homestead exemption or investor surcharge anywhere in North Carolina, so an LLC pays the same rate as an owner-occupant. Confirm the parcel's county from the register of deeds, not the mailing address, before you lock a stabilized tax line. Talk to your CPA about how that carries across a long-term hold.

RTP holds 22.5 million square feet of built space across 7,000 acres, founded in 1959, with a mixed office and lab stock and roughly 55,000 workers on site. Most of the park sits in Durham County, with about a quarter in Wake County, and it's served by its own special tax district: the Wake County side carries a Research Triangle Park district rate of $0.1030 per $100 for tax year 2026 on top of the county and municipal rates. We don't have vacancy, rent, or cap-rate data for RTP or any Triangle commercial submarket, so a page or a term sheet that quotes one would be inventing it. What we can underwrite is the specific lease, tenant credit, and repositioning plan in front of us, and for an asset that needs to stabilize first, we can bridge it and refinance into permanent debt once it performs.

A CRE bridge loan to carry the property through lease-up or repositioning, then a refinance into permanent debt once the rent roll performs. That two-step path fits the Triangle's structure well: campus-adjacent and RTP-adjacent assets in three separate counties with three separate tax regimes each carry their own underwriting quirks, and a lender who places both the bridge and the permanent piece in-house doesn't force you to re-sell your file at the handoff.