Realtor David Kilgore doesn’t want to “sell” any houses. Rather, he wants to help his clients find the home that’s right for them. “I’m not saying there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this job, but I don’t want a salesman trying to shove something down my throat, so I’m not going to try to force you to buy something you don’t want,” he says.
Kilgore uses pushy car salesmen to illustrate his point. “I don’t like going to a car lot and the salesman asking me, ‘What’s it going to take for you to leave with this car today?’”
What Kilgore prefers to do is trust his clients to tell him what they want, and then go from there. “I start with the basics: How many bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet do you want? And that’s what I’ll show them. If they want a three bedroom house, I won’t show them one with four bedrooms,” he says.
Kilgore also refuses to gloss over defects in the houses he shows. “I don’t try to convince people I’m showing them the best house they’ve ever seen. I tell it like it is. If there are faults, I point those out as quickly as I do the granite countertops in the kitchen,” he says. Kilgore’s low-pressure approach yields results. As he shows properties to clients, his buyers sometimes realize they want a bigger yard, more square footage, or another bathroom, and without having coerced anyone, Kilgore lands a bigger sale.
While some in the sales profession might frown on Kilgore’s approach, it’s hard to argue with his numbers. He’s a member of the Million Dollar Club, and he does a lot of business with repeat clients and referrals.
“My approach works for me because people feel like I’m trying to help them make a decision. Everyone does what they do to make money, and I’m no different. I’m not doing this just because I love real estate; I’m doing this to make a living. But I believe if I simply help you find the home you want, then the commission will take care of itself,” he says.
Despite having an aversion to salesmanship, Kilgore has made a career out of selling things. He grew up in Harrison, Tenn., took accounting classes at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and then graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a business management degree.
While Kilgore was still at UTC, Provident Life and Accident hired him as a clerk. During his more than 10 years with the company, Kilgore climbed the ranks to mid-Atlantic sales representative for Provident’s Life department.
Following a brief out-of-state stint with BBT, Kilgore, his wife, and his two sons returned to southeast Tennessee and settled in Dunlap. For the next 15 years, he ran his father-in-law’s business, Tennessee Amusement Company, which sold coin-op video games, pool tables and pinball machines. When Xboxes and GameCubes started keeping people at home, Kilgore moved to exit the business.
“I had purchased eight acres of land, and was going to build our house there, but then I started questioning whether or not I really wanted to maintain all of that land, so I decided to develop it and sell it instead,” he says.
Kilgore split the property into several lots, put in a road and utilities, and built two houses. When the first unit sold before he’d finished building it, he got excited.
“I wondered why I hadn’t started building homes 20 years earlier,” he says.
As luck would have it, Kilgore earned his real estate license and completed his exit from Tennessee Amusement just before the housing crash. When the job market tightened up and gas prices started rising in the wake of the dip, fewer and fewer people wanted to live in remote areas such as Sequatchie, Bledsoe and Marion Counties. As a result, Kilgore set aside his plans to continue developing land and building homes, and began focusing on listing and selling houses both in the outlying areas and Chattanooga.
He interviewed three companies, and was sold on Crye-Leike. “The other companies were great, but Crye-Leike stood out to me, and I figured if they stood out to me, they’d stand out to other people, too,” he says.
Today, Kilgore operates out of the Crye-Leike office in Hixson. Although the work is hard and the hours are long, he enjoys what he’s doing.
“I wish I had started doing this 20 years ago. I like it, even though I don’t have an eight to five schedule. Maybe I’m not working at 8 o’clock, but at 5 o’clock, I’m not going home because that’s when my customers are getting off work,” he says.
Kilgore has lived in Dunlap for 17 years. During that time, he and his wife of 23 years, Yvette, a registered nurse with BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, raised two sons, both of whom are in college. A sports enthusiast, Kilgore loves to play golf, although he hasn’t had much time for teeing off lately. In addition to making fewer trips to the greens, Kilgore is taking a break from coaching baseball, something he did for over a decade in Seqautchie County. “I started coaching the boys that graduated last year when they were six. I coached them until they were in middle school, and then the middle school coach asked me to help him, and then once the boys reached high school, I coached them through the summers,” he says.
Kilgore says he didn’t have a solid background in baseball when he started coaching, but he learned the ins and outs of the sport along the way. When the boys he’d coached for 12 years walked off the field for the last time, he had to choke back his emotions.
“I loved coaching them. When they graduated last year, it was meaningful,” he says.
Kilgore is taking a break from his duties on the diamond to watch his son play baseball at Cleveland State, as his heart wouldn’t be in coaching any game if his son was playing at the same time. He might coach again at some point, but is unsure if and when that will happen.
One thing Kilgore does know is he’s hooked on real estate, and has no plans to change careers again. Having survived a challenging time in the housing industry, he’s more convinced than ever that his approach of helping his clients, rather than pushing something on them, is the right one for him. With this in mind, he plans to continue “selling” the fewest houses possible.