Egbert Perry is chairman and CEO of The Integral Group, a top real estate and community development firm headquartered in Atlanta.
He’s developed all types of projects, including thousands of units of affordable housing. Integral was part of the team behind Centennial Place, an ambitious community that replaced a troubled public housing project with mixed-income housing, a school, recreational opportunities, and family services.
A native of Antigua and Barbuda, Perry also has held leadership roles outside of Integral, including serving on the board of Fannie Mae for 10 years.
What makes a good developer?
A developer is like a conductor or orchestra leader. A developer does not have to be a master of any one skill. He or she doesn’t have to be a good planner or designer or contractor or finance person or lawyer or property manager, but they need to understand all of those roles enough to know how they come together to create a good solution. What you are doing is managing the processes to produce a product, and that product is a great place or a great experience. That’s what a developer does.
What’s a valuable lesson that you’ve learned during your career that you can pass along to others?
There are people in the industry who operate off of a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. They think just being able to offer a nice place to somebody who has limited options is the only problem they have to solve, and, therefore, they don’t put as much time into making the place the best it can be. In other words, if they related to the development they are creating as if they were offering it to people who had a lot of choices, they would come up with better solutions, better products. I always say “let the real estate solution make sense regardless of who you are selling it to.” Once you’ve made those fundamental decisions, you can take some things off or modify a little here or there, but 80% or 90% of your solution should look the same regardless of who it is you’re serving.
Has your approach to affordable housing and community development changed over the years?
Quite a bit. Everything I just said I learned the hard way. But, the part that’s never really changed is that I’ve always viewed the work as if the place that I’m creating is somewhere my mother, father, sister, or brother is going to live. I relate to it that way. Would I want my mother to live there?
You’ve also served as chairman of the Fannie Mae board of directors. What did that role teach you?
I was there during the height of the crash. It was about working with an outstanding team of other board members and senior management to try to reform the organization, given the important role it played in housing America and in the country’s economic system. You sort of looked at it as if you were flying the plane and fixing the engine at the same time. That was a major undertaking, a difficult assignment. It was about watching the chaos that ensued when other factors impacted the housing opportunities that people had. A lot of people lost their homes. You realized some of the things we take for granted, we really should not. Good planning, good design, and good financing in the affordability equation are important, not just to get the initial price of the unit down, but to make sure you address the ability to afford it over the long term as well.
What’s a lesson you have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic?
If you concentrate poor people, and have them situated in places where you have poor access to health care, poor access to good, nutritious food (i.e. food deserts), proximity to environmentally contaminated sites, poor schools, and lack of access to employment and economic opportunity, one should not be surprised when something like a COVID-19 creates chaos and crisis for lots of people, particularly people who are in those conditions. It’s common sense. As much as we wouldn’t wish any of that on ourselves, we shouldn’t think it’s positive or acceptable to have whole segments of our society constrained to live in those kinds of communities, but we’ve done it. We’ve done it initially by intent, by design. Now, there’s less of that, but the legacy and apathy that came out of those early actions are still alive and with us today. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
If you can add any amenity or program to your developments, what would it be?
COVID-19 has made it clear that closing the digital divide is a huge challenge. Nowadays, just like you need water and air, you need high-speed internet access. It’s fundamental. Not solving that challenge will make access to a quality education even more difficult for lower-income persons.
Other thoughts?
I would leave with you a thought that this work is easy to describe, but hard to do. Community development requires cross collaboration. Housing is a separate issue from jobs and entrepreneurship and different from education, but community development requires that you deal with whole solutions that require you to look across all those lines. That’s the difficulty of the work and why people shy away from it and go for the simple-to-execute strategies, just addressing one of those at a time.
