Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 7, 2009
Local real estate agent making lemons into lemonade
David Laprad
When opportunity knocks, some people have their television turned up too loud to hear, others are too busy with everyday tasks to notice or too lazy to get off the couch, and still others throw open the door and embrace opportunity with everything they have. As an affiliate broker for Keller Williams and owner of Great Spaces Group, Dell Peoples has always been one of the latter.
A native of Chattanooga, Peoples began his professional journey in the ‘80s at Tennessee State University, where he studied broadcasting with the intention of spending his career in front of the camera. But some marketing classes, as well as keen observation of how those who entered his chosen field a few years ahead of him were spending their weekends, convinced him to change direction.
“I wanted to be in front of the camera,” he says, a sly grin crossing his face. “But in my mind, the folks who were having the most fun, and in some cases reaping the greatest rewards for performance, were the guys selling advertising. And early in their careers, they were spending their weekends at home, whereas the broadcasting guys were working Saturdays and Sundays. So I decided to try the advertising thing and never looked back.”
When opportunity knocked, Peoples answered and took a job with Gannett Company selling ads for The Jackson Sun, located in Jackson, Tenn. His employer rewarded his success with a promotion to a position in Nashville, Tenn., selling ads for The Tennessean.
In time, Peoples returned to Chattanooga and worked in sales for 3M, then added another Fortune 500 company to his resume when he made a transition to Federal Express to do transportation sales. He says his more than 10 years with the company were invigorating.
“It was run like the military in that they rewarded performance,” says Peoples. “If you lit up the books and kept your clients happen, they’d give you opportunities.”
By way of example, Peoples mentions how Federal Express later promoted him to its third party warehousing and cataloging division, where he called companies like L.L. Bean and Overton’s to convince them to allow Federal Express to place their product line in a catalog, build Web sites for online sales and provide transportation.
Peoples then took what he learned at Federal Express and tried his hand at the dot-com industry in Atlanta, not long before it bottomed out in 2000. Following a couple of years doing sales in another capacity, he decided it was time to follow his passion for development. As a husband and father of two, though, he knew he’d need to continue paying the bills, so he elected to go back into the development space by working as a Realtor.
“I wanted to understand why developers did what they did, and how they made sure they were successful, and I saw real estate as the only way to do it,” he says. “I had a background in sales, so I thought the best way to learn to work with a developer or develop on my own was to become good at selling the product and meeting my client’s needs.”
At that point, opportunity stopped knocking on People’s door and started pounding. When Peoples saw investors pouring millions of dollars into the Chattanooga Riverfront, he decided to steer his efforts toward the development of in-town neighborhoods.
“Timing is important, but so is seizing the right opportunities when they come your way. I was given the chance to work with not-for-profit organizations that were doing their own in-town revitalization and needed someone to sell their product,” Peoples says. “At the time, the market was going gangbusters, so I was able to help them pre-sell what they had.
“As a result, I had the chance to learn about local, state and federal incentives that would assist not only the developer but also the first-time homebuyer. So I took that information and weaved it together to come up with ways to assist people who might not otherwise be in a position to make a purchase.
“I had a lot of fun trying to identify the next big wave and figure out how all of the neighborhoods and communities were trending so I could come up with ways to turn them into something of interest to developers and buyers.”
Since then, Peoples has segued more into the commercial realm, creating live/work spaces in the Southside, developing several single family units on his own in the ML King area and helping to amass the real estate for a Federal Express sorting facility. And he’s found the work tremendously satisfying.
“I’m a developer at heart, so my whole thing is to take a lemon — whether it’s a parcel of land, a building people are overlooking or a house — and make lemonade,” says Peoples. “I’m working with investors who are looking for those kinds of opportunities.”
And once again, Peoples is being rewarded for performance. One of his current projects, for example, is the revitalization of the Germantown district in Nashville. “I’m blessed to always have something on which to lay my hands that stems back to something I did earlier in my career,” he says. “I’ve learned it’s OK to not be everything to everyone, but if you focus on the things you do well and work hard at them, people will give you opportunities, even if you don’t have it all figured out.”
While Peoples is just as interested in earning a paycheck as the next guy, as a “developer at heart,” he finds enjoyment in every step.
“I love finding out what a business owner wants and then creating a solution that meets his needs as it’s related to a piece of real estate,” he says. “I love finding a building in an emerging neighborhood no one else has noticed and realizing it would be a great space for a bakery. And I love watching a building morph into something new.”
Peoples plans to continue delving deeper into development as he moves forward in his career. Given his track record, there’s a good chance the next time someone hears opportunity knocking, it could be him rapping on the door.
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