The Effingham County data center announced on July 22 carries a $20 billion price tag and, at opening, 400 permanent jobs. Run the division: roughly $50 million of private capital per permanent job. The Hyundai Metaplant, 25 miles south in Bryan County, cost $7.59 billion against a target of 8,500 direct jobs — about $893,000 per job. Same region, same decade, two completely different economic machines.
By Julie Gates, RE/MAX Broker & Team Leader, Team 912
If you are repricing Rincon off the headline, you are about to overpay. If you are dismissing it because 400 jobs is not 8,500, you are missing what $20 billion of private capital does to a small county’s balance sheet. Here is the schedule, the tax math, and the three rings where the number actually matters.
You Are Being Asked to Price an Announcement
Here is the external problem, and it has nothing to do with the Effingham County data center. Effingham County’s median sale price sat around $350,000 over the last 30 days, down roughly 5% year over year. Roughly 44% of listings in the county have taken a price cut. Sale-to-list is running near 97%. Inventory is up about 10%. That is a market with slack in it — and a $20 billion headline just landed on top of it.
The internal problem is the one nobody says out loud. You watched Bryan County. Hyundai was announced in May 2022, and by the time most out-of-state investors got serious about Richmond Hill, the entry price had already moved. This is not fear of losing money. It is fear of watching the same thing happen twice from the sidelines.
The philosophical problem is the one that decides whether you make money here: announcements do not create rent. Payroll creates rent. Every investor who buys the press release is funding the exit of the investor who bought the payroll schedule. Coastal Georgia has run this experiment once already, in public, with a bigger jobs number. The results are on the record.
Step 1: Underwrite the Effingham County Data Center Payroll Schedule, Not the Press Release
Start with what has actually been committed. “Project Camellia” is four data center buildings at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, a 2,600-acre campus outside Rincon. Georgia Power will deliver 3.2 gigawatts in phases from 2028 to 2032 — enough capacity to power more than two million homes — under a 25-year agreement that includes up to a gigawatt of flexible demand response. Permanent employment starts near 400 and is projected to reach roughly 1,000 at full build-out. Construction has not started. The project still has to clear Georgia’s Development of Regional Impact review, and the DRI form was only filed the same week as the announcement.
Now put the Bryan County timeline next to it. Hyundai announced in May 2022. Production started in fall 2024. By early 2026 the Metaplant employed 1,444 people against a 2030 target of 8,500. That is nearly four years from announcement to fifteen hundred paychecks — on a project with twenty times the job count and no comparable permitting fight.
So here is what that means for a 2026 purchase in Rincon or Springfield: your 2026 acquisition has to pencil on 2026 rents. The Effingham County data center is the appreciation option on the deal. It is not the cash flow.
Run the current numbers and see for yourself. A typical Rincon home is worth roughly $342,000 with a median rent near $2,092 a month. That is a rent-to-price ratio of about 0.61% and an unlevered cap rate around 4.1%. If that does not clear your hurdle without the data center, the data center does not fix it. Model it against your own assumptions in the Team 912 ROI calculator before you write an offer.
Step 2: The Effingham County Data Center Tax Math Beats the Job Count
This is where the deal actually lives, and almost nobody is reading it correctly.
OpenAI is receiving a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years. Even abated at half, the company is expected to become the largest taxpayer in Effingham County. County Manager Tim Callanan has said the county may be able to cut the average homeowner’s property tax rate by 40% as soon as early next year, funded through the county’s “Project Zero” plan to eliminate homestead property taxes.
Read that carefully. Homestead. Your rental does not have a homestead exemption. A 40% homestead reduction does not lower your tax bill on an investment property.
What it does is raise what an owner-occupant can afford to pay you at exit. That is the transfer, and it is worth modeling.
Illustrative — substitute your actual millage rate before relying on this: at a 1.0% effective county rate, a $350,000 house carries about $3,500 a year, or roughly $292 a month. Cut the homestead portion 40% and the owner-occupant buying that house from you carries about $117 a month less. At a 7% thirty-year rate, $117 a month of freed debt capacity is roughly $17,500 of additional purchase price.
That is the mechanism. A capital-dense employer with a small headcount does not flood the county with renters. It floods the county with tax base — and tax base shows up in owner-occupant affordability, school funding, and resale demand rather than in your rent roll. Underwrite it as an exit-side variable, not an income-side one.
Step 3: Buy the Corridor, Not the Parcel
Three rings, three risk profiles.
Ring one — Rincon, Springfield, Guyton. Closest to the Effingham County data center site and most levered to it, in both directions. This is where construction crews will rent and where permanent staff will buy. It is also where you eat the loss if the DRI stalls. The upside right now is negotiating room: 36-plus days on market, 44% of listings already cut, sale-to-list under 98%. That leverage did not exist in Richmond Hill in 2022.
Ring two — Port Wentworth, Pooler, west Chatham. Already carrying the Port of Savannah, Gulfstream, and Hyundai spillover. This adds a third anchor to submarkets that were never dependent on any one of them. Note the constraint before you underwrite: Pooler’s short-term rental rules removed easy nightly income for most new investors, so this is a long-term rental thesis. Our full Pooler investment breakdown has the current permit picture.
Ring three — Richmond Hill and Bryan County. The completed case study. If you want to know what Rincon might look like in 2031, read what actually happened in Richmond Hill between announcement and production.
One more structural point that survives every political outcome: 3.2 gigawatts of transmission capacity is being built into Effingham County. Transmission corridors are permanent. Industrial land follows power, and it does not follow it back out again. That is a durable fact about the county’s development ceiling regardless of what happens to this specific tenant, and it is the same logic driving the Savannah commercial and industrial thesis.
The construction wave is the near-term operating opportunity. Thousands of construction jobs are projected across 2028 to 2032, with a stated preference for local contractors and suppliers. Those crews rent by the month. Furnished inventory near GA 21 is a position you build in 2026 and 2027, not a revenue line you book in 2026.
Step 4: The Effingham County Data Center Is Not Approved Yet
I do not get paid to sell you optimism, so here is the other side of it.
The DRI is not approved. Georgia classifies these as large-scale developments with impacts beyond the host municipality, and the evaluation has to be completed before the project advances. Two other Georgia data center DRIs were filed the same day.
Coastal Georgia is actively fighting this question. Garden City and Camden County have both adopted moratoriums on data centers. Glynn County declined residents’ request for a pause. Effingham itself added data centers to permitted zoning uses within the past year, largely without public attention.
Water is unresolved. The industrial park sits in a water use “Red Zone” south of GA 119, where permitted withdrawals from the Floridan aquifer have been reduced to protect against saltwater intrusion. OpenAI has described the campus as using a closed-loop system with minimal water use, but at the public open house company representatives said the volume and source have not been finalized.
Opposition is organized and it has a national precedent. In Saline Township, Michigan, a board denied data center zoning in 2025, the developer sued over exclusionary zoning, and the township settled — the site later turned out to be part of the same Stargate program OpenAI compares Project Camellia to.
The underwriting rule that follows: do not pay a data center premium for a project that has not cleared DRI. If a seller in Rincon has already priced the announcement into the ask, walk. There are hundreds of active listings in that county and nearly half of them have already reduced.
What It Costs You to Get This Wrong
Overpay 8% on a $350,000 Rincon house and you are into it for $28,000 more than the market. At a 4.1% unlevered cap, that house throws off roughly $14,350 of annual NOI — so the overpay is about two full years of net operating income, gone, in a county where the median sale price is currently down year over year. If the DRI stalls or gets conditioned, you do not get that $28,000 back at exit. You paid a boom price into a soft market.
The opposite error costs too. Effingham County’s population grew roughly 42% between 2010 and 2025. The Savannah metro added about 33,500 residents between 2020 and 2025 and reached 438,314. The port, the plant, and now a third anchor are all in a three-county radius. Sitting out the entire coastal corridor because one project has permitting risk is how investors spend a decade being right about the risk and wrong about the market. The full picture is in our Savannah population growth analysis.
What It Looks Like When You Get It Right
You buy into the softness, not the headline. You take a $350,000 house at $325,000 because the seller already cut once and it has been sitting 60 days. It rents near $2,092. It covers debt service on 2026 rents with no data center in the model. Then the build-out runs 2028 to 2032, the county’s tax base triples, homestead rates fall, and the owner-occupant buying it from you in 2031 has meaningfully more borrowing power than the one who would have bought it in 2026.
The inner move matters as much as the outer one. You stop reacting to Savannah headlines and start reading DRI filings, Georgia Power transmission schedules, and county millage sheets. That is a different investor than the one who called about Richmond Hill in 2023 after the price had already moved.
The Plan, in Plain Language
Underwrite on today’s rents. Treat the Effingham County data center as an exit-side tax and demand variable, not an income line. Pick your ring based on how much permitting risk you can carry. Refuse to pay an announcement premium on an unapproved project. Then let the 2028-to-2032 build-out do what build-outs do.
Run the numbers with Team 912. We represent investors across Chatham, Bryan, Effingham, and Liberty counties, and we can pull current Effingham comps, millage, and rent data on any address you are looking at. Email julie@team912.com or call (912) 600-2893.
Not ready to talk to anyone yet? Model the deal yourself first at roicalculator.team912.com — plug in your own rent, rate, and tax assumptions and see whether it clears before the data center ever enters the math.
Market figures cited reflect data available as of July 2026 and should be verified against current MLS and county records before an offer. Property tax illustration uses an assumed 1.0% effective rate for modeling purposes only; substitute the actual Effingham County millage.
About the Author: Julie Gates leads Team 912, an all-investor real estate team at RE/MAX Accent in Savannah, GA. She has been investing in the Savannah market since 2004 and has helped clients across the country buy income-producing real estate in coastal Georgia. Reach the team at julie@team912.com or (912) 600-2893.
