Top Employers in the Greensboro-Triad Region: Legacy Brands and New Giants

The Triad is a market in transition. For decades, it was textiles and tobacco. Those industries mostly left. What replaced them is more interesting than most people realize. Toyota is building a $13.9 billion EV battery megasite in Randolph County — the largest single investment in North Carolina history. Honda Aircraft builds business jets in Greensboro. Cone Health employs 13,000 people. The Triad isn’t what it used to be. It might be better.

I buy commercial property in the Triad, and the transformation happening here is creating real opportunities for sellers.

Greensboro-Triad’s largest employers

Toyota’s megasite: the game-changing investment

I normally avoid hype. But the Toyota battery megasite in Randolph County deserves attention. $13.9 billion in total investment. Up to 5,000 direct jobs at full build-out. This is a facility that will produce lithium-ion batteries for Toyota’s EV lineup, and the scale of it is hard to overstate. The site is 1,825 acres. Construction employment alone will run into the thousands for several years.

Here’s what a project this size does to a commercial market. It creates a gravitational pull. Battery suppliers, component manufacturers, logistics companies — they all need to be within trucking distance of the plant. That means demand for industrial buildings and flex space along the I-85 and I-74 corridors. The ripple effect will reach from Greensboro to Asheboro to Lexington. Every commercial building in that radius just got a new potential tenant pool.

Legacy manufacturing, reimagined

The Triad lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in the 2000s. Textiles went overseas. Tobacco declined. But the manufacturing infrastructure — the buildings, the workforce, the transportation network — stayed. And now it’s being repurposed.

Honda Aircraft builds the HondaJet in Greensboro, employing 1,800+ people. Ralph Lauren operates a major distribution center. Hanesbrands still has its headquarters in Winston-Salem. These aren’t the same industries that built the Triad in the 1950s, but they’re using the same flex and industrial buildings, the same highway system, and the same skilled labor pool.

That transition matters for property values. An industrial building that used to house a furniture manufacturer might now be a distribution center for an e-commerce company. The walls don’t care what’s inside them. And modern industrial tenants often pay higher rent per square foot than the old-line manufacturers did.

Related: Growth Drivers of the Greensboro-Triad Region

Related: Top Infrastructure Projects Reshaping the Greensboro-Triad Region

Healthcare holds it together

Cone Health and Wake Forest Baptist Health together employ over 25,000 people in the Triad. That’s a staggering number for a metro of this size. Wake Forest Baptist (now part of Advocate Health/Atrium) operates a medical school and research campus, which adds biotech and clinical research employment on top of the standard hospital jobs.

Healthcare is the bedrock. It doesn’t make headlines like Toyota’s megasite, but it pays the bills every month. Every one of those 25,000 healthcare employees is a consumer who shops at local retailers, rents apartments or buys houses, and uses self-storage. The multiplier effect is steady and predictable.

Guilford County Schools rounds out the top employers at 10,000+ employees. School systems are the ultimate sticky employer — they don’t relocate, they don’t downsize in recessions, and they grow with the population. In a market going through an industrial transformation, that stability matters.

What this means for commercial property sellers

The Triad is a market where timing matters. The Toyota megasite is still ramping up, and the full supply chain impact won’t hit for another two to three years. But smart sellers know that the best time to sell is when buyers are paying for future growth — not after it’s already priced in. As I discussed in my article on Triad infrastructure projects, the highway and utility investments in the region are designed to support this next wave of manufacturing growth.

For sellers, the Triad offers a compelling story: stable healthcare anchors plus a transformative manufacturing investment. Industrial and flex buildings along the I-85/I-40 corridors are well-positioned. And legacy buildings with good bones and clear heights can attract the new tenants that the Toyota ecosystem will bring.

If you’re considering selling commercial property in Greensboro, I’d like to hear about it. Call me at 704-600-3839 or visit rothcapital.com.