Carrol Fisher: Builder, developer sees Salisbury as a place that's ready for growth

Carrol Fisher likes to say he built a new office building on North Main Street to attract his son Luke back to Salisbury.

But the attractive solar structure and improvements made to the rest of the property also signal a change in attitude for Fisher, a builder, developer, manager and engineer who sees Rowan County and the 50-mile radius around it as a good place to build again.

Fisher plans to construct 68 new apartments in Salisbury: 24 on Bringle Ferry Road, 32 on Woodson Street (Forest Village) and 12 on Locke Street. All will be called South Square apartments, featuring a unique two-bath, two-bedroom design.

For Charlotte, Fisher's plans are even more ambitious: a $12 million project over three years that will include 352 units. Some of those units - 10 to 15 percent - will be the first multi-family, geothermal units. Designed to be entirely independent of fossil fuels, the geo-thermal units will rent higher but cost less to live in. They will include a greenhouse, Luke Fisher says.

The Charlotte project, proposed for the university community being developed in the northern end of the city, will be known as Knights Bridge Apartments. Fisher hopes to build 250 in the first 24 months.

These plans follow three years in which Fisher has constructed $7 million worth of housing in places far removed from Rowan County.

Those projects, financed with the help of federal money and limited partnerships, have been built in Wilmington and Spartanburg. The Spartanburg apartments represented an entire city block of downtown housing, for example.

But Fisher senses an attitude change in Salisbury that may be less conservative and more conducive to growth. So does 26-year-old Luke Fisher, who left his job with Federal Electric Pacific in Raleigh to become a vice president with Fisher.

"This hasn't been the best place in the world to gamble," Luke Fisher says of the recent past.

"...You can't stay in a stagnant area and survive."

Apartment builder

Carrol Fisher, 61, is hardly a stranger to Rowan County's housing industry. He has built some 185 apartment units here since 1956, for example. But after building the East Wind Apartments in 1981, he looked toward what he considered better growth areas.

In the local market, he found it difficult to find an interest rate below 11 percent. In addition, Rowan County represented a depressed area for rental property, offering units at a relatively low cost while builders were faced with a high cost of money. He found the opportunities for limited partnerships and creative financing better in places such as Wilmington and Spartanburg.

"You cannot build a unit at 13-and-a-half percent," Fisher says.

Fisher will be working through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in financing the 68 apartments in Salisbury, for example. Application is made through HUD, which insures the loan money, and the N.C. Housing Finance Agency floats bonds for construction at a reduced rate.

Second generation

Carrol Fisher believes the apartment projects are part of the company's second generation, exemplified by the addition of his son and sales coordinator Dennis Bunker.

Bunker, a high school classmate of Luke Fisher's, formerly worked for Pilot Realty. He wears several different hats for Fisher, aiming now toward the commercial sale of steel buildings, the construction of free-standing stores and strip shopping centers, for example.

The company also remains interested in building single-family residences, particularly in the West Wind Court subdivision off N.C. 150 and the Corbin Hills area off Stokes Ferry Road.

Fisher's management of rental property has grown to be a big part of the business - some 500 units at present. Usually, when Fisher has built apartments, the company has remained owner and manager.

The elder Fisher says the company hopes to be managing 1,500 to 2,000 units within the next few years.

The Fishers have satellite offices in Wilmington and Spartanburg. The company recently purchased a computer to help with management. "So we're going in a million different directions," Fisher says.

Besides being an effort to attract his son, Carrol Fisher says he also built his new office "because it was time to clean up this junkyard." The North Main Street site that clings to the railroad tracks was the home of Salisbury's first ice plant, a Pet dairy and a concrete block manufacturing plant before Fisher located here 17 years ago.

Through the years, several companies have sprung out of what Fisher started as Fisher Engineering. They include Fisher Supply, which used to include a hardware concern on Innes Street; Fisher Realty; and Fisher Financial, an embryonic offshoot to deal with today's complex financing arrangements.

Fisher has a core of about 25 working for him full-time, including construction coordinator Allan Messick, a veteran builder, and Don Lyerly, a controller who feels at home with the company's computer.

Carrol Fisher started his construction career in Rowan County by building single-family homes and commercial pools. He built the Meadowbrook pool, for example. He remembers the days, such as 1964, when Fisher Engineering was offering a three-bedroom house at $328 down and $68 a month. That was back in the first generation.

Today, it's a new era for the Fishers and another chance to grow.