Agents Moonlight to Cope With Slump
In tough times, many local real estate agents seek secondary sources of income to compensate for the market’s instability.
J. Tucker Beck has been selling real estate with Crye-Leike Commercial for 30 years. But when the market dried up in the fall of 2007, he turned to an old fraternity brother to help him line up a job at Huey’s.
2008 everything had closed and nothing was going on’ and that’s what scared me,” Beck said. “I wasn’t born with a spoon in my hand, I’m going month to month on payments. If it wasn’t for the three girls that own Huey’s and all of the management, I would have lost my house.”
Beck just recently brokered the Sale of Kudzu’s Bar & Grill in Downtown Memphis, and relocation Lease for Sylvan Learning Center of Memphis from an Office to a Retail space in Cordova.
While having a firm retail background is valuable – from understanding signage to demographics to traffic volumes – it’s nice to have a buffer in a sour market.
“Retail, when it’s going good, it’s a fun thing to do,” he said. “But the bulk of my brokerage in the last three or four years has been really, really bad.”
But Beck is optimistic that the CRE market will see better days. In the meantime, he has his alternative revenue stream to fall back on.
“I have a half acre across the street from The Pyramid, I’ve had it (listed) for years,” he said. “Bass Pro is supposed to happen, but when are we going to see some activity and some speculative ventures going on in that immediate Pinch area? I would have thought we would have already seen it, but we haven’t. But I’m optimistic. There’s a direct correlation between how hard you work to how much income you make. It’s an energy level thing – keep your head up, keep it going, think positive.”