Broker Boss

Terry Espy found her niche in developing properties

When TERRY ESPY moved to Wilmington in 2006, it was to work on a very specific, and unfortunately doomed project, The View on Water Street building, or as she calls it now “the hole in the ground with the fence with the keys on it.” She had a very successful development business in Raleigh, and you’d think after three years of working on an ultimately failed endeavor, when her partners up north said “Hey, c’mon home,” she’d have jumped on it.

But a lot had happened in those three years. She’d met her “permanent fiancée”, Wilmington artist and designer John Sharkey, and she’d fallen in love with the possibilities of this small coastal city. Now ten years later, Espy is the president of the Downtown Business Alliance and a figure in Wilmington development, who herself has ownership stakes in two downtown restaurants, multiple Airbnb properties and a 2015 CoStar Power Broker Award.

Her company MOMENTUM, will soon be moving into its new Front Street offices, and her fingers are all over the new Italian family-style restaurant due to open at the end of the summer in the Hotel Tarrymore property on Second and Dock. Basically, if someone’s thinking about a new business venture downtown, Espy knows about it.

But if you told twenty-year-old Espy, a Conway, South Carolina girl freshly graduated from University of South Carolina in Columbia, that thirty years later she’d be a real estate broker, she would have probably laughed. Not knowing quite what to do with herself right after college, a friend actually suggested she try being a flight attendant.

Espy and her then husband became skilled at rehabbing their houses, skills she inherited from her father who was a historical preservationist by hobby. After meeting with a potential contractor in the Boston area, a young man offered Espy a job on a new show he was starting, called This Old House. That’s how Espy ended up working with Bob Vila for a while, changing her career entirely and putting her on the path to project management. Random indeed.

Flash forward to 2014, and Espy and Sharkey were driving back from a month in California, where Espy was seriously considering a job offer. But that same willingness to follow the random signs of the universe turned against her Cali plans as first one friend, then another, called her on the road to ask for her help with properties back home in Wilmington. So, now she’s here to stay.

As president of the Downtown Business Alliance, Espy has pushed the idea that even prior to opening, a new business needs to be creating and fostering ties within the community.

“I was raised in Myrtle Beach. I understand the seasonal tourist market, and the only thing that keeps you alive in the winter is the loyalty of the locals,” Espy says.

She has also made sure the growing districts of Castle Street and North Fourth are considered part of the downtown business community. She says she’s particularly excited recently about the arrival of entrepreneur James Goodnight, who has brought several downtown properties, including the one housing tech startups NextGlass and Likeli.

It doesn’t look like Espy will be slowing down anytime soon.

“My mother said one of the challenges she faced is that so many times back then, women didn’t set their sights very high,” Espy says. “You set it with what you knew you could achieve. Now I’m in my mid-fifties, and women my age tend to have evolved a bit. We do about five, seven, years in one thing, and we say, ‘Okay, done with that, let me go to the next level.’ It’s not anything someone will hire you to do, you gotta do it on your own. Who would have thought that as a flight attendant or as the tool girl, I’d be developing high rise buildings?”

To view more of photographer Erik Maasch's work, vist websta.me/n/emaasch