Marty Holmes and Bill Smith on their 23rd floor office overlooking Main Street.

Marty Holmes and Bill Smith joined forces in 1988 to form Holmes Smith Developments, Inc. Their own description of the firm is found in their brochure:

“Every business has specialized needs. The focus of Holmes Smith Developments is to provide turnkey real estate development services to address those needs. We outsource the bulk of the disciplines required for a successful project while always maintaining complete responsibility for the results, a strategy which allows us to match the best resources available with the appropriate tasks.”

A quotation from George Wilson, vice president at Columbia’s office for BlueCross/BlueShield, further describes the firm:

“When others said it couldn’t be done, Holmes Smith Developments, Inc. completed our 80,000 square foot building in five months. Since 1988, we have worked together on six projects totaling over 720,000 square feet – and all were completed in record time.”

Marty Holmes, president, graduated from East Carolina University in urban planning, 1978. He held real estate development positions in L. J. Hooker and also in SCANA. He is a past chairman of the board at Palmetto Richland Children’s Hospital, and he is an active member of the Central Carolina Economic Development Alliance. He is also a board member of Hammond School.

Bill Smith, chief executive officer, graduated from Clemson University in business, 1982. His prior real estate development experience, for the most part, was with Columbia’s Edens & Avant.

Overall, he has been involved in the creation of over 10 million square feet of office and industrial space.

He serves on the board of trustees at Clemson, and he is a member of the board of directors at the EdVenture Children’s Museum and the Columbia Urban League.

In downtown Columbia Holmes Smith is probably best known as the developer of the Publix on Huger Street. Next door in the Confederate printing building, they are developing seven two–story townhouses facing Gervais Street. Elsewhere in the Columbia area, they developed offices for Climatic Corporation (66,000 square feet) and Ikon Office Solutions (88,000 square feet). And for BlueCross/ BlueShield they put up two facilities (456,000 square feet and 80,000 square feet) in Columbia.

Holmes Smith’s largest project in SC is the regional distribution facility (1,000,000 square feet) for Harbor Freight Tools in Dillon.

An out–of–state project which reflects the Holmes Smith standards for scale and quality is the Michelin warehouse and distribution facility (600,000 square feet) in Moody, AL.

Coming soon in Columbia, across Huger Street from Publix, is the development of the Kline Iron and Steel site. A mixed–use compound, mostly commercial offices, the Kline property is planned as a visual terminus down Lady Street and as an east boundary to the State Museum and EdVenture sites.