Listen to this article 3 min
A massive development is ready to rock Nashville’s entertainment industry.
Development firm Al. Neyer and entertainment venue Rock Lititz are partnering to bring a 55-acre entertainment rehearsal and production campus to Nashville.
The development, called Rock Nashville, will consist of three buildings with 515,000 square feet of sound stages, creative offices and production facilities for artists and performers to create, build and rehearse their shows, according to a news release.
Rock Lititz is a 108-acre production campus in Lititz, Pennsylvania. The campus has been hosting Nashville artists for years which made Music City the obvious choice for its second location.
“We've been dreaming about Nashville for a long time. The Nashville market has really evolved from country music to a global music destination,” Andrea Shirk, campus general manager for Rock Lititz, told the Business Journal. “There was an obvious demand from the industry, but we never found the right commercial partner to help make it happen. We met the Al. Neyer team, and it became evident that they had a vision of developing this from an industrial real estate perspective, and we had the vision from an industry perspective.”
Al. Neyer and Rock Lititz are partnering to bring a first-of-its-kind entertainment development to Nashville.
The Rock Nashville campus will offer 13 band and production studios, a full-sized stadium rehearsal facility, an amphitheater and set storage, as well as a community cafe.
More than 32 companies will call Rock Nashville home. Confirmed tenants include Soundcheck, the largest rehearsal studio complex under one roof in the world, and Clair Global, which provides live production services and audio solutions, according to the release.
“When we built the arena and rehearsal spaces in Lititz it became evident that this was really missing in Nashville," Shirk said. "We were starting to get so many country rehearsals in Lititz, but those country artists call Nashville their home. They want to be there, but the Nashville market didn’t offer them this product.”
The campus will include 44 acres of development over a 55-acre site in Nashville’s White Creek neighborhood. The joint venture paid $18.75 million for the larger 82.3-acre site, located at 4808 Buena Vista Pike, in February.
“We’ve continued to try to develop in some of the peripheral areas of the downtown core, but finding good development land has been very challenging this close to town,” Patrick Poole, Nashville’s market leader for Al. Neyer, told the Business Journal. “The area of Whites Creek is notoriously underdeveloped and wants to continue to be underdeveloped, so it was a really unique opportunity that we felt that we could achieve a very aesthetic and community focused development in an area this close to downtown.”
The joint venture broke ground on Rock Nashville in April, and the campus is expected to open in fall 2025.
“You've seen a lot of projects fall apart in the last few months due to interest rates, but this one really has benefited primarily because we have these two anchor tenants that allowed this project to really kick off from a liability standpoint,” Poole said. “Entertainment space is at an all-time high, and it's creating more and more demand for the tenants and type of community that we're looking to create here at Rock Nashville. Economically, those two things combined really allowed this project to push forward even though we are in a bit of a challenging economic time from a lending perspective.”
