The Journey of a Community Builder and Real Estate Entrepreneur with Mark Deutschmann

 

Evan Holladay: Welcome to Monumental. I’m your host Evan Holladay and today we have Mark Deutschmann and he is the founder and CEO of Village Real Estate Services where he and his team have sold thousands of homes over the last two decades with a simple message or simple mission to collect local communities and the people in them. Mark them started Core Development and they have since developed more than 30 projects throughout Nashville in the urban core and have won various awards for their innovative projects. Mark has also, outside of his real estate work, been the chairman of Urban Land Institute in Nashville and the former president of Greenways for Nashville. With that, Mark, there’s so many directions we can take this but can you quickly take us through your background and how it led to and shaped into the person you are today? A few other words that I saw in reading your book: community builder, entrepreneur, juggler, the list goes on.

Mark Deutschmann: I was speaking to you in Nashville yesterday and I said I’ve never lived in a city until I moved to Nashville and I did not come to Nashville with real estate experience. I was a juggler, and I was a marine zoologist working with killer whales. When people ask me how I got here, sometimes I tell them that my boat caught on fire because I was working with the orca up in British Columbia and found a super pod of whales. It was really truly exciting, I was coasting along with them and I look back and my boat had caught on fire and it turned out to be a herring adventure but I landed on an island and I walked into a camp and found a guy with long hair and long beard and to make a long story short, it turns out he was from Tennessee and I came for a visit in the 80’s and I’ve never left. But I got my start in real estate because I was working in Hillsboro Village which is a little neighborhood commercial village near Vanderbilt and I was helping with the merchants. I was working with the neighborhood merchants association and working with the beautification in the neighborhood and looking to help revive a commercial district but I got a real estate license and when people ask me what I do, I said, “I sell real estate within a one mile radius of Hillsboro Village” and they said, “Is that all that you do?”

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] “Is that it?”

Mark Deutschmann: I said, “Well, yes but I know the condition of every house in the neighborhood, I know that Vanderbilt’s trying to get their employees to move back, I know that we’re next to Music Row and the creatives are liking this neighborhood and a lot of people are looking to get back to the city. So if you know anybody who wants to buy a house in Hillsboro Village, you let me know.” And that strategy worked and soon I was selling 27 houses, then 43, then 63, then 80 and it was a natural progress to a career.

Evan Holladay: Coming to Nashville and something I found on your book that I thought was very valuable was what you stressed over and over again whether it’s through finding your own identity or finding your company’s identity or finding your community’s identity is that unique selling proposition. That was your One Mile Radius around Hillsboro Village.

Mark Deutschmann: Correct. Then coincidentally I was a juggler and I was juggling and doing juggling gigs to make my living when I first moved here so I do gigs for the music industry, I do corporate gigs, I did some TV advertising and I would juggle at my open houses. I wore the suspenders and the Converse sneakers even to the GNAR events, the real estate events and sort of made a name as a juggler so I was the juggling realtor. It was strange and catchy but it worked in scene advertising, the Nashville Scene, it worked in identifying me from the rest of the pack so I had two different angles that I was working at the time.

Evan Holladay: I think I remember a line where you specifically referenced, it gave you more dynamic in any relationship whether it be in real estate or outside of real estate. You weren’t just known as the real estate guy, you were known as a real person and they could see you as a person instead of just a realtor.

Mark Deutschmann: Yes, and the National Scene when it started I was one of the first advertisers and I’d use that dynamic to separate myself from the pack again and it led to being voted the best realtor in Nashville for like 9 consecutive years.

Evan Holladay: Wow, I didn’t know that.

Mark Deutschmann: Nobody else was doing it. I feel like if I had moved to San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York City I would have gotten lost in the pack but Nashville was at a particular place in its history where we had a downtown that had no housing, we had neighborhoods ringing Nashville that had seen their better days and it really needed a neighborhood champion and I could come in and fill that role.

Evan Holladay: What would be your advice to somebody that is getting started out in their career maybe not exactly knowing the direction they want to go in or trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves?

Mark Deutschmann: I still think that an agent should figure out his unique selling proposition. Everybody comes to whatever they’re doing with their own identity and you can bring whoever you are to your business and you’re going to be better served so if you are skillful as maybe a school teacher then maybe you bring some of that into the business. We have a gentleman named Tony who came off oil platforms, he was a drilling guy and he still wears that hardened look and edge but he’s leveraged it to become a very successful agent in our company.

Evan Holladay: That is amazing. I think the overarching theme of your book One Mile Radius and as well your unique selling proposition is that One Mile Radius, that building community right around a walkable centre creating different mixes, making it some place that people can be proud of.

Mark Deutschmann: For me, One Mile Radius is geographic. I can think about working in Hillsboro Village where I got my start. I also moved over to 12th Avenue South in the late 80’s and that street was nearly 50% vacant.

Evan Holladay: It’s hard to believe now.

Mark Deutschmann: I know, it’s a beautiful street but it really was 50% vacant with lots of underutilized commercial buildings and I’d gotten permission from my former company to do some commercial sales which was wonderful and so I did a count of all the buildings on the street – there were 54 of them at the time – and started to identify who owned them. Through the years, we created a strategy which was another One Mile Radius strategy to try to find users for all those buildings because I was learning that walkability is key to a successful neighborhood and if you could create neighborhood commercial districts and arts and the beginnings of our coffee shop craze here in Nashville then people would be able to find community and they’d be attracted to those neighborhoods. Over time we were able to successfully re-brand the neighborhood, we called it 12 South Neighborhood Commercial District and create what is a very viable community today. That said, I think a unique selling proposition for some people is not necessarily geographic. Some people have something that’s maybe again more tied to how they work with people like a school teacher might decide that they want to work with younger couples that have elementary aged kids and she might decide that she needs something that defines that so that people know that that’s what she does best. There could be a widowed agent in the business and they like to help single people who have the same circumstances buy their homes. Again, they’re just bringing what it is that they have experienced in their own lives to the business and doing what’s best for other people from their own experience.

Evan Holladay: Yeah, and finding that niche and owning that niche and making sure you’re visibly clear on where you’re going. I think what you were talking about with 12 South brings up a good point, like you said, you looked at all the commercial property owners, you developed a strategy to go for the future of 12 South, you re-branded it, you’re not just doing one thing at a time. You’re looking stepping back and saying, “OK, if we really want this to be successful we need to plan for success.”

Mark Deutschmann: Yes, and success means partnerships. We worked with a lot of different constituencies to make that happen, so we worked with the MDHA, the Metropolitan Housing Development Authority, we worked with Sunny Side Neighbors which was an older neighborhood group that had history in the neighborhood, we worked with the Belmont neighbors, we worked with the Montrose Alliance, we worked with all these various smaller neighborhood groups that were close to 12 South to find out what it was that they wanted. The MDHA helped us work with the merchants that existed and they asked, “What is it that you want in a neighborhood?” and they said, “First of all, we want people to slow down and stop and shop. Secondly, we need sidewalks. The sidewalks are terrible. The street lighting is terrible. We need really new paved street.” They told us what they wanted and they were also looking for safety, there was things they were looking to do to make the neighborhood feel more safe to get more eyes on the street. What we did is I actually started a company with a friend of mine, Joel Salamon – the guy with the beard and the long hair that I talked about – called 1221 partners and we ended up strategically buying 11 buildings on the street. What we were trying to do wasn’t to keep those buildings, we were trying to secure them and then look for merchants who wanted to come in and do something on the street. We sold one building to Whitney [Inaudible [10:36] the Creative Fitness Center for a dollar. I bought it for 80 thousand dollars, I sold it for 80 thousand and a dollar, and she moved in and created a business but that’s what we wanted. We wanted people to come in and take ownership and to be stewards of the street. Gradually we ended up selling most of those billings to people who became merchants, but gradually the MDHA and public works and finally Mayor Purcell when he was elected came in and helped pave the whole street and finish the sidewalks and the streetscape and it set the stage for what it is today.

Evan Holladay: What you talked about, you jumped right in to saying how important partnerships are and I think I picked up on that from your book and from you going through so many learning experiences and also you back-packed cross country, you hitch-hiked so through all those different experiences you were able to make connections and make friends, and you grew your network in such a way that even in Nashville you’re here and through your development work, through your real estate work and even outside of that you’re involved in so many different groups. You started the juggling group, the National Juggling Group. So many ways that you’re able to connect with people.

Mark Deutschmann: That’s interesting. When I finished high school I decided to forgo college and I hitchhiked across the country and ended up hitchhiking across the world logging 20 thousand miles and I realized that you could define yourself however you want with each individual ride. You’d end up with a conversation and you could take it one way or the other and you could define yourself by whatever parameters you decided. We’re all a collection of many different experiences and many different maybe personalities and you could take [Inaudible [12:31]. I feel like that helped me come in and define myself here in Nashville when I came on my own, settled down and I could come in with all the different aspects of myself and then apply it to community and relationships and community building. What is now has now come of what started then.

Evan Holladay: Yeah, and laying that groundwork over a long time.

Mark Deutschmann: A lot of a little is a lot.

Evan Holladay: A lot of a little is a lot, I like it. That’s like the silly expression, “How do you eat an elephant?” one bite a day or one bite at a time.

Mark Deutschmann: Yeah, I know we’ll talk a little bit about village but The Village Fund which owns 5% of our company started when we started in 1996. The thought was if it owns a piece of the company then we’re able to start making contributions to the community immediately as long as we have profits or distributions, then we can start making donations. At first we made 100 dollars so we were able to give 5 dollars, then we made a thousand dollars and we gave fifty dollars, but the thought was as long as we can share what we do with community along the way and it’s going to be a successful relationship. In that respect, a lot of a little is a lot as well.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. Seeing that you put 5% ownership in The Village Fund when you first started village real estate services I just thought that was very unique. I’d never seen a founder put 5% ownership, not 5% of profit or 5% of cash flow. You said, “I’m giving you ownership and I’m going to keep it outside of the company, you’re going to get the 5%.” I just thought that was very powerful and it’s an action that shows where your motives are and what you want to accomplish.

Mark Deutschmann: I thought that was a good tool as well. I had been working with a group called the Social Venture Network and it was a group of business owners committed to a just and sustainable economy and it was the likes of Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt, Annita Rodick of The Body Shop and others who are all using business as a tool and I was getting successful in real estate sales but I was also wondering what am I going to do. How can I make some change in the world using a business and I was thinking about just creating something else in business but I felt like real estate needs some help as well, and there isn’t a real estate entity that’s doing what I think could happen in the real estate business so why not start my own company? That’s why I started Village, that’s why I decided to put 5% into The Village Fund and I started Village in 1996 and that was during the dot com era, and I was watching all these companies out in Silicon Valley going from zero to a billion in no time flat and that’s where it came from. If felt like, well if Yahoo had put 5% of the company into the Yahoo fund and it grew to a billion dollars in two years, great. If they ended up selling that company and making distributions that would be a good value for their community and the likes of Google and Apple. Not all of them started in that time but you can see [Inaudible [16:05] companies have built…

Evan Holladay: The instant growth.

Mark Deutschmann: What have we got, now a trillion dollar company? Wouldn’t that be great if 5% of it was owned by the community? And relatively we’re still a little company but The Village Fund, when we finally got to a million dollars that we had given back to the community in 2014 and we celebrated with our million points of light party and then here in 2018 we’ve now hit two million dollars so there’s been an acceleration because it’s not just the distributions anymore, we’ve become a group of change agents so we have a lot of our agents who give per transaction to the fund and it might be 25 bucks, it might be 50, it might be 100 depending upon what the agent wants to do with their money at closing but again, a lot of a little is a lot. So all of these agents contribute in a lot of closings and sometimes their vendors and sometimes their customers creates a more robust fund for the community. Maybe we’re just getting started.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. I think it’s like the hockey stick of any successful company. If you really compound on that success, eventually you’re going to hit a tipping point where your growth and your giving, in this case, and your impact… And that’s why I think you’re the perfect guest for Monumental because you are the epitome of the people we want to talk to. You are making monumental change in the world and being able to make an impact. I think that’s really powerful like exactly what you said, you said, “I couldn’t find a real estate company that was doing it the way I thought business should be an agent for change”.

Mark Deutschmann: We started with two agents, myself and two agents and now we have 360 agents in staff. I encourage them to think about the causes that they care for and so we give to homes, neighborhoods and communities to The Village Fund so we look for ways to serve the community with urban arts, youth enrichment programs, affordable living, the things that make a good urban core. We’ve given to hundreds of organizations. This year alone, I think we’ve given to 138 different organizations and so they become our community partners but some of our agents are more closely tied to particular causes so we have an agent named Megan and she got involved with a company called Rebuilding Nashville Together which is retrofitting houses for seniors to help them age in place and now she’s on the board of that company and now we’re looking to really partner up with that organization to do some more good work. She and the executive director of that organization are bringing it back to Village. Of course we’ll give more money and we’ll care more about it if we have a change agent who’s the face of the organization that cares. I like people to find their cause, too. Essentially we say find your place but find your place within Village, find your place within the non-profit community or non-profit partners and go make a difference where you feel compelled to do so.

Evan Holladay: One other thing that I personally want to learn from in your journey is you talked a lot about your spiritual and mindfulness growth and the different groups you were in, the Social Ventures Network, there’s a few other ones that you were able to connect with people that are looking at business the same way and looking at it from a more wholehearted and a more connected matter. I think I would like to learn more about that, I know other people would, too.

Mark Deutschmann: We’ll have to send you up to Social Venture Institute up in Cortes Island at Hollyhock, and I think as Hollyhock as my adult university. I went and worked with the Social Venture Network and an offshoot was the Social Venture Institute and they do programming for a younger group of entrepreneurs and they teach them the connection of spirit and business and community. Every year up at Hollyhock maybe 90 or 120 different entrepreneurs get together and do a week up there, there’s so much good that happens. I had gone through a program previously called Spirit and Business and that was the precursor to Social Venture Institute and I was one of the early entrepreneurs that went through the program and they came in just after I started Village and filmed our company in Nashville, Tennessee probably around 2000. I was taking groups through the Werthan Lofts and showing them different dilapidated old buildings downtown and they filmed it all so it’s a legacy film of the early days in Nashville. I was just back there a couple of weeks ago, back at Hollyhock which is still a great adult learning university.

Evan Holladay: Where is Hollyhock?

Mark Deutschmann: Hollyhock is in British Columbia, it’s maybe 100 miles north of Vancouver in a beautiful idyllic setting in a magical place and it’s just perfect for personal growth.

Evan Holladay: That’s great. Quick aside, you had mentioned that you got to introduce Dr. Wayne Dyer at an event and it was funny because as I was going through your book I was thinking, your spiritual growth reminded me of things that I had read in Wayne Dyer’s biographies and his books and then I read the next like and it’s like, “Oh, he introduced him at an event.” Dr. Wayne Dyer means a lot to me because he meant a lot to my mom and I had just so happened to be reading that book when she was at a bad point and she was going through terminal cancer, ended up passing away shortly thereafter but it was amazing to see that connection where I saw the connection to Wayne Dyer and then you mentioned Wayne Dyer and it’s just funny how things work.

Mark Deutschmann: I’m glad to have that connection, that’s very interesting. Hollyhock had done a series of conferences with celebrity authors called Body and Soul and we did conferences in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco and back then I was quite a good juggler and I also used juggling as a metaphor for life so I could take a piece of work that Wayne Dyer was doing and create some juggling metaphor and use it. They called me a weaver, so I’d stand up and I’d weave a juggling tail in a way as an introduction for a celebrity author and so I do recall the introduction of Wayne Dyer, he had some book that had the name seven in it, I can’t remember the name of the book but I had seven different points and I started with one ball, then two balls, then three balls, then four balls, five balls, six balls, seven balls. So I did a full on seven ball presentation to introduce him and it was, I think, unique.

Evan Holladay: That is amazing. When you started Village Real Estate you eventually hit a point where you wanted to get into development and add that as a component of your community building. Could you take us through that first development, the Werthan Lofts and also how you made that plunge? I know you mentioned you went from a sales and marketing background over to a development side which can be very different but also could have been to your advantage.

Mark Deutschmann: I don’t know that I consciously decided that I wanted to be a developer, I think what happened is that I was invited with a group of agents to come in and take a look at the Werthan Mills Lofts or the building that became Werthan Mills Lofts because they were starting to think about creating lofts in Nashville. We did not have them at the time, we weren’t like New York City and some other places where lofts were prevalent but people had been asking for lofts in our city for years. So when I was asked to come in with a group of agents and to tell these potential developers what I thought about the project and could we sell them, we were fairly enthusiastic and said, “Yes we can” but they didn’t do it but I’d gotten sort of sparked. I wanted to see it done. For whatever reason, I found myself in the center with relationships to MDHA, to the new mayor, Bill Purcell, to Nashville Civic Design Center which was doing the plan of Nashville and I could see that that neighborhood wanted to happen and I was able to convince the bank to give me a loan for 6 and a half million dollars to do a first segment of a four hundred thousand square foot warehouse in a dilapidated old building with pigeons and dripping led base paint. We convinced them to give us some money.

Evan Holladay: And you convinced yourself.

Mark Deutschmann: We convinced ourselves, it was a process, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take that leap and risk everything I had created to date because it really was a risk but they helped me with that. The bank said, “We’ll give you the money but the only [Inaudible [25:55] is that you have to sell all the units” so we had to pre-sell all the units which meant finding all those potential loft buyers and bringing them together and having conversations and charrettes and convincing a lot of people with a sales background, and so it worked and we were able to get those sales and we got the money and we developed the lofts. Then we did another phase of 27 and 36, then a big phase of 120 and another phase of 98. It’s 352 residential lofts today and it’s a signature project, I think it was a great anchor for Germantown at the time because Germantown, believe it or not, had a nice, little, solid core of people who cared about the historic neighborhood but there was not much other happening and so it started setting the stage for a redevelopment of another One Mile Radius.

Evan Holladay: Yeah, and that’s where Jined and I live today, we call it home. I love Germantown so I think that you’re right, that started that spark for that neighborhood now, it’s a beautiful place and everybody wants to live there.

Mark Deutschmann: Probably one of the most walkable neighborhoods in the city at this point.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. That One Mile Radius really did grow out from that catalytic development.

Mark Deutschmann: Not only out, it’s all the way to the river at this point, it’s come back in with the new sound stadium, it’s come back in and filled out the Bicentennial Mall and the whole neighborhood is filling in back to the city which is what we’re experiencing now throughout our city. Very different than the early 90’s.

Evan Holladay: That brings up a good point: when being in development myself and also just seeing the growth of our cities, do you see ways that cities and community leaders, community builders can address gentrification and just making sure that people are wanting to move back to the core which is also in turn pushing out families that can’t necessarily afford these new developments. How can we as community builders address that?

Mark Deutschmann: It’s fascinating because we didn’t think about that conversation 30 years ago. It was really about trying to [Inaudible [28:21]

Evan Holladay: That people would come in.

Mark Deutschmann: Yeah. A lot of the houses in this neighborhood and 12 South and Germantown were boarded up and you had a lot of absentee landlords that weren’t taking care of the properties and affordability was not an issue, it was just livability and trying to get people to take some ownership but people are moving back in the cities throughout the world. I think I hear that 2 and a half billion people will move back to cities in the next 20 years or so which creates affordability issues and it’s happening throughout the United States but more prevalently in some, Nashville’s really experiencing it but a lot of other cities are experiencing it, too. And some cities that aren’t yet like Nashville will experience it so there are lessons to be learned. There’s lessons to be learned from what’s happened here, there’s lessons to be learned from other cities that are experiencing the same. I think we really need to think about the gentrification issues and maybe affordable living issues and workforce housing issues trying to get in front of it so I’m sure you and I are both thinking about that today, about what we can do best in our next steps.

Evan Holladay: I know this has come up in other cities, it’s come up in Nashville. What are your thoughts on inclusionary zoning?

Mark Deutschmann: I think it has to be well thought, inclusionary zoning is a great idea in some ways but if you don’t do it thoughtfully then you can actually cause development to stop.

Evan Holladay: Hinder, right.

Mark Deutschmann: Also, you have to worry about people who have already decided to create a development if you just lay down a mandatory exclusionary zoning and tell them that they have to do something that they didn’t plan for, that project may no longer be viable.

Evan Holladay: Right.

Mark Deutschmann: What I do think that we can do is that as you start thinking about transit stops and even trail oriented development stops, if you look at places where you’re up-zoning and maybe creating more valuable for the landowner, you should be able to up-zone and create inclusionary zoning mandate that actually enhances the value of the community for everybody. That’s when I think it’s really appropriate and there’s lots of opportunities to do that here in Nashville if we can figure out the formula.

Evan Holladay: I forgot to mention for our listeners, inclusionary zoning is when a government or metro government requires affordable units or requires some part of the development to be affordable in some form or fashion.

Mark Deutschmann: I served on the mayor’s task force for affordability and transportation recently as the ULI chairman and there were a lot of conversations about affordable – we called it affordable living. We were looking at the Charlotte Corridor for instance, and we were looking in various transit nodes along Charlotte and we were looking at what happens if you actually have mass transit and transit stops. How do you think about zoning and affordability and affordable living and affordable locations for merchants and how do you think about that surrounding neighborhood and what could you do to keep those values from rising so quickly that you’re forcing out the neighborhoods. There are some great suggestions that came from all parties that were documented and sent to the mayor’s office and I think it’s there for conversations. Even though we didn’t pass the big transit referendum, we still have a transit issue and we’ll start looking at corridors, perhaps the Dickerson Road Corridor which will then have transit stops, which will then have affordable living conversations and possibly transit oriented development up-zoning and we will have to actually implement what we’re talking about.

Evan Holladay: Segwaying into your talk yesterday, the ULI event, I got the opportunity to hear you talk about greenways and transit oriented development and also what you called T squared development, TOD squared development?

Mark Deutschmann: T squared OD.

Evan Holladay: T squared OD, there we go.

Mark Deutschmann: I served as the president for Greenways for Nashville for 6 and a half years and have been involved with Greenways. We’ve built out a greenway system in our city which includes 88 miles of paved trails and 225 paved primitive and park trails but we’ve increasingly started to look at the urban core and to use greenways as connection and greenways as transit and thinking about active mobility and [Inaudible [32:58] opportunities. Other cities are ahead of us. In Charlotte they’re putting in their cross Charlotte trail and they’re looking at what happens when you put a trail in an underutilized neighborhood, maybe, and they’re creating opportunities for pocket parks, thinking about opportunities for food and what might be a food desert, they’re looking at affordable housing, they’re looking at retail and how retail is now starting to orient towards the trails and the panel that we had yesterday was called More than a Trail and we brought in somebody from the cultural trail of Indianapolis who’s doing developments along the trail and somebody from the Minnesota midway talking about what happens when you build these trails. They become bike highways, for one, they become Meccas for development and they create opportunities for merchants to actually orient towards the trail and they cause property values to rise significantly which can be great for some people but it might not be great for everybody. From our perspective, we want to think about our urban trail system which is not yet really happening. We’re starting to build a 22 mile loop around the city called the city central greenway, it will have some spokes that will come into the city, one being a rail and trail line coming in from one city at Charlotte all the way down to our farmer’s market in the Bicentennial Mall and we have to think about what we want to do with those trail oriented development opportunities and then what do we do when those trails cross corridors. If a trail crosses a corridor at the right place, it probably means that you might have transit oriented development and trail oriented development at the same time and that’s where you get T squared OD. It’s like transit oriented development on steroids.

Evan Holladay: Right, the perfect development.

Mark Deutschmann: Yeah, the perfect development.

Evan Holladay: I love it.

Mark Deutschmann: We’re talking about the fairgrounds quite a bit right now in Nashville and we have a fair grounds which has about 120 acres, it’s been a sight for a race track, it’s been a site for the flea market, it’s been a site for the state fair for 100 years.

Evan Holladay: It’s got a creek running through it.

Mark Deutschmann: It’s got a nice Brown’s creek running through it which will be part of our trail system. They’re putting in a 47 acre park right now, they’ve convinced the fair grounds that this floodplain will never get developed and it’s all flat, and they’re laying down 8 surface soccer fields on Nolensville Corridor which is really our new immigrant community Mecca. You’ve got Kurds and Hispanic and other cultures that love soccer and to create a soccer park is just amazing for that community. And it’s got the first makings of the Brown’s creek greenway which will eventually connect all the way down to downtown. Now we’re talking about major league soccer and putting a soccer stadium in, keeping the race track, obviously keeping the fair park and then recreating an exhibition hall for the flea markets. Wouldn’t it be good if you have multi modal opportunities for people to get there? Not just transit on Nolensville Corridor, not just people driving and parking their cars but maybe getting there with bikes from 12 South or bikes from Rolling Mill Hill downtown or bikes from the Gulch? Because they’re all going to be connected and it’s going to be better for the whole community if people can access and have other opportunities.

Evan Holladay: And have many options for transportation and from point A to point B enjoying that ride.

Mark Deutschmann: Yeah. Walkability is key to a healthy city and it turns out bikeability is really key as well. It seems in what we’re seeing that if Nashville or other cities start connecting the dots creating greenways and then complete streets on corridors and creating places for people to move safely as pedestrians and bikers, people will become pedestrians and bikers. If you develop for cars, you’re going to have more cars. If you develop for bikes and pedestrians, you’re going to have more bikes and pedestrians. I said it yesterday, I said, “If you develop for people, you’re going to get more peds – pedestrians and peddlers. If you develop for cars, you’re going to need more meds because you’re going to harden the arteries of your corridors and you’re going to get stress because your commutes are over an hour long and you’re just not going to be happy and you’re going to need some meds.”

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] exactly, and the crowd loved it yesterday.

Mark Deutschmann: They did.

Evan Holladay: That brings us to another thing. Your company, Village, your core development, your involvement in groups and furthering community building in Nashville is phenomenal. You have an amazing track record, you’ve accomplished a lot. What at this point keeps you going?

Mark Deutschmann: Right now, building the urban greenway system. I’m a champion for the cause, I want to see it happen. To me, it’s a legacy opportunity. We’re about to go out with a major fundraising campaign, it’s expensive to build these urban greenways. It’s more expensive than building them in suburban or along creeks out in the suburbs, you’ve got infrastructure needs, you need to build pocket parks along the way, you need to think really in an intelligent way about how they get built and this is going to be something that is going to be there for our kids and our grandkids and their kids because what’s laid down stays down. This will be part of the corridor, the bike and pedestrian friendly corridor that we’re going to lay down in the city that will stay for generations. I like to put it out that way and I think that their good corporate stewardship and involvement with our wonderful philanthropic organizations is key to getting that done in a way that makes it happen faster because I think we’re at a tipping point where we missed on the referendum perhaps or maybe it was the wrong referendum for some people but this is not a miss for anybody. This is something that we can do right now and we can lay down these trails, we can make this city central greenway a reality and the community will be better for it.

Evan Holladay: And like you said, we’re putting in the work now and the time and the money and the effort and it will be there for generations to come.

Mark Deutschmann: I was thinking about it this morning. I think that we do a corporate campaign and we have some people who are ready to step forward and help with that but we probably should do a legacy campaign where we think about the quests and legacy where people can think about greenways in every quest because I could see it as something that people would be drawn to. It’s like they get drawn to using the greenways and they’re thinking about what they do with their assets when they’re gone and yes, do they give it all to their children? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they want to give to communities, maybe they want to give to their universities, maybe they want to give to Hollyhock, your adult university or maybe they want to give to Greenways to lay down those trails for not only their kids but other kids and grandkids.

Evan Holladay: Their grand kids and their grand grandkids, exactly. I overheard Nancy asking you earlier, what is your favorite greenway in Nashville?

Mark Deutschmann: Back in the day when Joel – the guy with the long beard and the long hair – and I were walking around, we used to do something we called night walks and so we’d explore neighborhoods and alleys and look at the houses through the lens of night, but we also love to go to Radnor Lake and walk the trails in the evening which was not legal but we did it anyway. Now, so many people use that trail. Sometimes we’ll go out and find other greenways to use. We have some wonderful greenways, I’m really loving the Stones River greenway right now because I was so involved in helping put together that major park system in the north east and now it can run all the way down from the Percy Priest Dam all the way down to the pedestrian bridge crossing over the Cumberland river into Shelby Bottoms which is another wonderful greenway, down all the way to the Shelby Street bridge or the John Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge. Richland Creek is wonderful, too. It’s a great greenway in a neighborhood that’s going to continually get more connected. It’s great for a nice loop, some of them you just walk out and you can’t get back. If you want to do a nice [Inaudible [41:42] loop, you watch Richland Creek greenway and it’s perfect.

Evan Holladay: That’s nice. I wanted to segway into your 50 at 50, your goal setting and how that…

Mark Deutschmann: Oh, that was years ago.

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] also it sounds like that’s transition, though, and every year you’re learning and adding more goals to that list. Can you tell us a little bit what is 50 by 50?

Mark Deutschmann: Sure. In my 50th years, I was 49 years old, I started thinking about what I wanted to get done by the time I was 50 and that was 2008 and you might recall that was a recession year. That was when I had started a multi-family residential sale strategy and I was selling communities like the Icon and the Gulch and Rolling Mill Hill, all these communities and I had 16 hundred pending sales and I realized that the market was about to come to a stop. It was like, “Oh, this is disaster. All these sales are just going to fall apart” but I didn’t want to just lament, I wanted to still live life so I thought about my 50 by 50 as a strategy to make sure that I had life work integration, meaning that I was thinking about what was going on for my health, what was going on for my family, what was going on for my spiritual growth, my intellectual pursuits and business and so I decided that I wanted to get 50 things done before I turn 50 and I started making a list of all the things that I would like to do and would want to do. It turned out that list was like 130 long and there were a lot of things on the list. The good thing was I looked at that list all through the years and I started accomplishing some things in every aspect of my goals. I didn’t necessarily accomplish all of them, I did accomplish 50 maybe 60 that year but at least I did something in all those goals. It just made me aware of being stay steady and everything that you’re doing throughout your life. Don’t just get so focused on your work or so focused on something that’s ephemeral that you don’t think about the big picture.

Evan Holladay: There were some pretty amazing things on that list, could you share one or two things that are on your current list that are unique or interesting or just a little outside the box for you?

Mark Deutschmann: Unique and interesting, I still like to juggle so I make sure that I have juggling on the list. I’m a 5 ball juggler now and I don’t do the knifes or the danger items anymore but I want to keep up my chops because I think that it’s good for that left brain, right brain thing. It’s good for my coordination, it keeps me going a little bit but I also have some goals to do, to go into a deep trench in a submarine so I’ve been putting that on my list every year. I haven’t quite done it yet but I’m still hoping to do that. I have things that I put on the list every year that are in my life list that I hope to get done. I always do a little scuba diving, I like to river kayak so I always like to challenge myself to hit 5 rivers and make sure that I keep my roles in and there’s a whole bunch of things, then also I want to raise millions of dollars for greenways and I want to create a successful spring convention because we’re hosting the spring convention for the Urban Land Institute this year and I want to make sure that our company health is there. I have goals for my wife because she’s writing a book right now and I want her to finish her book so I want to give her the space and the support that I can to make sure she does that. My daughter’s going to Divinity School, I want to make sure that I give her the support and so she gets her goals done. It’s not just me, it’s me thinking about the community and what I can help do to steward the community.

Evan Holladay: I think that’s something that a lot of us look up to, is someone like yourself that can be able to look at the big picture and look at all different aspects of life that you want to better yourself and better those around you all at the same time. I want to jump into our Monumental questions.

Mark Deutschmann: Monumental questions?

Evan Holladay: Monumental questions. These are just short questions. First one is: what does success mean to you?

Mark Deutschmann: Work life integration. I think having a cause beyond yourself and making sure that you’re doing something for the bigger community.

Evan Holladay: I like that. Do you have a morning ritual or a daily habit that contributes to a good day?

Mark Deutschmann: Yeah, every day I walk 5 miles. For 5 years, one of my goals is to walk 18 hundred miles a year so I just do it every day. A lot of a little is a lot and that’s sort of my thing. As you elder – and I think it’s a good idea to elder early in some ways – you start letting go of some of the things that you did in your youth. I do not race down ski slips anymore, I don’t juggle knives anymore, I don’t do fire, I don’t do a lot of things that I used to do because you have to let some things go but walking is good for everybody and it just goes in hand with walkable neighborhoods and walkability on greenways. It’s something that I can do. In fact, I have something called Duck Out with Deutschmann where one of my agents can book a time with me to take a walk and talk, or one of my staff and it’s a great way for me to connect with people. It’s just a unique thing that comes along with walking.

Evan Holladay: That’s pretty awesome. I’ve read other books of leaders that have done similar things where they’re walking and talking and walking and thinking and walking and creating, creates that perfect combination.

Mark Deutschmann: I like it because you’re not sitting and having a face to face at lunch, you’re walking side by side and you’re walking at the same pace, you’re pacing each other, you’re deciding which way to turn and it is a great way to just hear what people are doing, what they’re needing perhaps, but also a great way to create, envision and dream.

Evan Holladay: And be in that moment.

Mark Deutschmann: Night walking’s got its own. Night walking does it in the darkness so it opens up another channel.

Evan Holladay: That’s great. What is your favorite book, or book you’re currently reading?

Mark Deutschmann: I just finished a book which I really enjoyed called, let’s see… Solving for Happiness. It was by a guy who is with Google X, he’s an executive at Google who does these space launches when he’s thinking about all these things that are maybe impossible to achieve. He’s an engineering guy, he had a reason to write a book, his son had died and he was trying to figure out happiness and so he actually engineered his formula for solving for happiness and I thought it was really fascinating.

Evan Holladay: That’s amazing. Mark, I really enjoyed our time today. I had a blast with you. How can people reach out to you or follow you?

Mark Deutschmann: Let’s see, onemileradius.com, I believe is the best way to reach me if you’d like to get a copy of my book or to sign up for a Twitter feed or a blog or LinkedIn, I like to link in with people, it’s a nice way to connect. All that can probably be found through onemileradius.com. Or you can email me at markd@villagetn.com.

Evan Holladay: Thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Deutschmann: Thank you.