Andy Davis
Vice President, General Manager, 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 the Memphis construction market is busier than it’s ever been and that its level of activity has been steady.

There are more large projects under construction in the city than anytime in the last 30 or 40 years, he adds, noting that Ford’s $5.6-billion BlueOval City in nearby Stanton, Tenn., has been a catalyst for activity in Memphis.

“There’s no doubt that when you get a major investment like that, that takes place right on the outskirts of the city of Memphis, it brings a lot of other components and other parts of projects that end up coming on to it,” Davis says.

Other big projects he noted 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 construct two 15-story towers, according to the hospital.

Another big-ticket project he notes is the almost $2-billion investment from Amplify Cell Technologies, a manufacturer of batteries for electric commercial vehicles, to construct a new production facility in nearby Byhalia, Miss.

The transportation sector is busy in Memphis, which is FedEx’s hometown. The shipping giant pulled permits last August for its $220-million, 1.3-million-sq-ft expansion of its World Hub, according to Memphis Business Journal. The Tennessee Dept. 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, per TDOT. The $800-million project was announced in July and is being funded by almost $400 million from the U.S. Dept. of Transportation and up to $250 million each from TDOT and the Arkansas Dept. of Transportation.

Even Elon Musk is taking notice, locating his xAI supercomputer campus in South Memphis, where Davis notes the company just secured approval to lease more than 500 acres at the site.

“When I first came here in 2016, there may have been five, maybe six $100-million-plus projects going on,” Davis says.

Now the number of projects that hit that mark is substantial, a positive development, he says.

However, Davis adds that smaller projects under $30 million or so haven’t started as quickly as usual in the past year or so thanks to rising interest rates. And that’s created some capacity among trade contractors, even as workforce shortages continue to rank as the top challenge for Memphis contractors.

“I think that’s still going to be continuing 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 cost-effective place to do business compared with other similar areas, but as the demand increases, pay and therefore costs are set to increase as well.

“We saw that on BlueOval, where what they were paying for a plumber or mechanic or electrician was higher than what the going rate was,” he says. “And so the market had to adjust to that.”

Going forward, those issues are going to continue to strain the industry, Davis says, as questions around interest rates and the election remain up in the air.

That workforce pressure, he adds, is being driven in the central part of the U.S. by recent emphasis on electric vehicle manufacturing and in the Southeast by snowballing data center construction.

Closer to home, higher education projects and public K-12 efforts in Shelby County, the largest school system in the state with more than 100,000 students, continue to drive work as well, Davis says.

The Memphis market’s also been bolstered by workforce development investments championed by Gov. Bill Lee, such as the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, for which Turner is contractor for two projects: TCAT Memphis and TCAT Covington.

Davis notes that other TCAT projects are in the works by other contractors.

Turner is also at work on the $650-million terminal modernization project at Memphis International Airport alongside Chris Woods Construction Co. and Ardmore Roderick.

“I do feel that Memphis is still in a prime place to continue to see growth over the next three to five years,” Davis says.