The developer, Mack McClung, has been waiting 27 years to build on a prime piece of Midtown Nashville real estate, and now is the time. VOCE Hotel & Residences is set to start sitework in August, and sales are fast approaching developer Vastland’s pre-sales goal. Early buyers have already realized appreciation with the implementation of the first round of price increases earlier in the year.
![](https://static.therealdeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2a9554228963a367322e22364daa6c80-2048x1425-1.jpg)
The forthcoming 25 story, 700,000 sf ft mixed-use tower will contain residences, hotel, office, two restaurants, meeting and conference event space. Vastland’s Mack McClung has been holding the lot in red-hot Downtown Nashville since 1998; now, with tech companies and tourists pouring into the city, McClung has assembled a team of experts and begun to build Nashville’s first vertically-integrated mixed-use luxury building at the perfect time. TRD sat down with Vastland CEO McClung and Senior Vice President Ryan Keane as well as Colliers Executive Vice President in Office Brokerage Doug Ryan to get an inside look at how VOCE is uniquely positioned to meet a host of growing demands in the Nashville market.
Location + Timing = Perfection
Vastland’s name comes from McClung’s early days of being focused on land acquisitions starting in the 1980s. The intersection of location and timing has always been at the heart of the real estate industry, and McClung found success by leveraging his intuition to make smart purchases in the right places and develop them when the time was ripe.
“We learned that, when you buy the right piece of land, opportunity will follow,” explains McClung. “Then you assemble a team of people that know what they’re doing.”
McClung developed some of Vastland’s earliest purchases into retail locations and factories for Fortune 500 companies like Kroger, Walmart, Dover Corporation, and Berkshire Hathaway. Vastland acquired the land on which VOCE will be built in 1998 as part of a larger office purchase, and the firm has held it as the market matured and McClung became a major player in the Tennessee development world, building everything from retail to industrial, multifamily, residential, and hospitality.
Now, with a wealth of experience, VOCE is the logical next step in Vastland’s “natural evolution” into the mixed-use highrise space at a moment that’s perfect for this particular site.
“The barrier to entry in this market is very high.” remarks Keane. “Vastland entered it in 1998, so with no debt it puts VOCE in a very enviable and unique position.”
This evolution couldn’t be better timed. Nashville, where VOCE is located, is home to one of the nation’s fastest-growing office markets. Tech has embraced Music City, with giants including Amazon, Tik Tok, Facebook, and Apple already located there. Oracle even recently announced a plan to relocate its world-wide headquarters from Austin to Nashville. Combined with a booming tourism industry (the city saw a 35% growth in tourism from 2022 to 2023) and expanding demand for residential as workers relocate to the area, Nashville is hungry for a high-end building that offers a boutique office and residential experience combined with the high standard of services that both verticals have come to expect in the post-pandemic world.
“The market has matured for hospitality,” says McClung. “Since we have the entitlements for office and retail, we incorporated those uses to create a vertically-integrated, mixed-use building that fits the market.”
The location, close enough to downtown to make for easy access but far enough away to avoid the gridlock of tourism, makes VOCE the perfect location for boutique offices, hotel and residences, the ground-level food and retail, as well as the roof top restaurant and pool area.
“Our location is second to none for this type of project,” says McClung.
The Flight to Quality
VOCE is a unique offering in Nashville because it combines so many different spaces in one building and provides the same level of luxury service across all of them. From the 310 spacious condo hotel residences, of which 114 will be dedicated hotel suites, to the 60,000 square feet of Class A office space, VOCE meets the demand for a high level of service that has grown immensely since 2020. Adding a hospitality element through the hotel offering was a natural extension of Vastland’s vision for the product.
![](https://static.therealdeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/d1cb0ebf973553ea991f77b3b1c4e36c-2048x1065-1.jpg)
“Office itself is approaching hospitality,” says Ryan, who points out that, because “companies are using their space to attract their workforce back,” the modern office looks more like a hotel than a gray floor filled with cubicles. VOCE takes this to its logical conclusion by not only opening up its luxe residential amenities to its office tenants, but, thanks to the building’s hotel offering, giving those tenants the ability to offer workers coming in from out of town a convenient and comfortable place to stay in the very same building as their office.
“We already have corporate multi-unit buyers that are buying it just to have their own in-house corporate hotel,” says McClung.
“This is an integrated, very boutique office opportunity for a tech company to have a floor to themselves in a building that has all of their amenities right there,” says Ryan. “To me, it’s the last step in the flight to quality.”
Hotel Program
At VOCE, the hospitality element even extends to the residences themselves. Residents have the option of putting their home into the hotel program, a unique offering in the Nashville market that gives owners the option of doubling as investors. And, because the hotel program is managed entirely by VOCE, there’s no additional work on the part of the residents.
“This is not a short term rental building,” explains McClung. “This is a full blown, full service four star hotel, with 30,000 square feet of amenities including: food and beverage, spa and fitness center, pool, pet spa/park/lounge, indoor/outdoor club lounge, and valet parking.”
The hotel program, in combination with the building’s comprehensive amenities, boutique office space, and retail offerings, makes VOCE a unique offering in the booming Nashville market, where the demand for amenitized office space and Downtown-adjacent hospitality is on the rise.
“It’s a little bit serendipitous,” says McClung. “The market is perfectly suited for our delivery in 2026.”
With delivery coming up, Vastland is looking for the right tenant for VOCE’s 60,000 square feet of Class A office space. So if you want to secure your next office space, residence, or investment property in Downtown Nashville’s first vertically-integrated mixed-use building, contact info@vocehotelandresidences.com today.