by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Donna and Ken Smallwood are so busy that they hardly have time to see each other except over shaving cream and toothpaste in the morning.
But, that’s OK.
They love what they do and intend to keep on keepin’ on until they drop.
“We both love what we are doing,” said Donna, the vice president of Vanguard Realty/GMAC Real Estate on Kingsley Avenue in Orange Park. “We both figure that one of these days we’ll just drop dead one day doing what we love doing. If we are happy in what we are doing, why would we quit? We really do love it. I’m sure we might slow down eventually.”
Both work a minimum of 50-60 hours a week at their respective professions. The time they get to spend together is rare, but they try to go to the gym in the mornings together, eat dinner together when they can and spend time on the weekends together.
“You don’t feel like you are busy if you are having fun doing what you are doing,” said Ken, the principal of Ken Smallwood and Associates, a commercial real estate company in Orange Park. “Neither one of us look at what we are doing as a chore. We really kind of look at it as kind of a privilege. Very few people get to do what we do. It’s kind of fun.”
“We really appreciate the time we do get to spend together so we just have to schedule that time together,” said Donna.
Though they cover two different sides of real estate, they both have extremely busy schedules and have both become power names in the real estate community as a whole.
Residential real estate keeps Donna on her toes while commercial real estate is what gets Ken’s blood pumping.
“We are both really involved in real estate, so we have a lot in common,” said Ken. “We always have something to talk about over the dinner table.”
As a commercial real estate agent, Ken deals predominately in land.
“I’m a land broker, mostly in Clay County,” said Ken. “I sell big chunks of land. I don’t generally do one lot here and one lot there. I try to do 100 acres here, five acres there.”
He usually sells land to developers who will improve the property to get it ready for someone to build houses, a shopping center or warehouses.
Ken is also a pilot who rents a Cessna plane to fly over Jacksonville to show clients land or for pleasure. He’s only been flying for five years, but has found it very instrumental in his dealings with land.
“My wife wouldn’t let me be a pilot as long as we had children living at home,” he said. “So when my last daughter moved out of the house, she finally said ‘OK, now go kill yourself.”
With his ability to fly over Jacksonville, he can get a better view of what is available for his clients. So, is there a chance he may sell himself out of a job?
No way!, he says.
“All those dire warnings about us overcrowding ourselves out of existence - bah, humbug!” he said. “There is more land than you can imagine.”
Ken is in a partnership that bought about 1,000 acres of land on Branan Field Road about four or five miles south of the former NAS Cecil Field.
“Cecil Field has 17,000 acres and is owned by the city of Jacksonville,” said Ken. “When the Navy had the deed signing ceremony where they signed the Cecil Field over to the city of Jacksonville, there were five small airplanes that were flying around in a circle in a holding pattern and I was one of them.
“When the Navy officially signed the deed and handed it over to Jacksonville, they radioed us and told us to fly on in. I had (former Florida State) Sen. Jim Horne in the airplane with me and I was the very first airplane to land.”
In addition to his real estate business, Ken joined the Orange Park Rotary Club in 1989, moved up the ladder and is now currently the district governor of Rotary International District 6970.
“After you have been successful in your business and realize that you have earned a great living off of the community, then you start saying ‘What can I do to give back? ‘What can I do to help this community that has done so much good for me’?” said Ken. “I looked around and Rotary wound up being one of those things I wanted to do.
“Rotary is one of those interesting organizations that is made up of leaders. Everyone expects you to do something. Everyone gets the chance to be a leader every now and then. I found that I really liked doing Rotary, so I went from being on the board of directors to being the club president and here I am now the district governor.”
He is the official representative for Rotary International, which is made up of 160 countries, 31,000 clubs and 530 districts.
“It is my job to represent Rotary International to all of the 3,500 Rotarians in Northeast Florida,” said Ken. He’ll also have to speak to all 40 or so clubs in the district.
He has also been involved in the Clay County Committee 100, was an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1996, and was the Clay County Economic Development Council chair in 1997.
“You just have to do it all,” he said.
Rotary is taking a tremendous amount of time this year because he has obligations to visit all of the clubs in his district; Donna is now an honorary member of the club and tries to keep involved.
“I try to go to some Rotary lunches with him but, because of my heavy schedule, there really isn’t much time. It started out as his passion; now it’s ours. Rotarians are like a second family to us.”
Ken earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Alabama.
He then went into the trucking business, which took his family from Alabama to Tennessee, North Carolina and then Florida.
“I was in management with Yellow Freight Line and they transferred me everywhere,” Ken said. “I got out of the trucking business and went into the warehousing business in Texas. That company transferred me back to Florida in 1982 and then in 1989 I decided to get into the real estate business.”
Ken’s first company was called S.D.I. Realty.
“The media was tagging Ronald Reagan’s S.D.I. [Strategic Defense Initiative] as ‘Star Wars,’” said Ken. “I thought I would instantly sound familiar if I was S.D.I. Realty.”
Back then he was a commercial real estate agent involved in all facets of the industry.
“We did office, warehouse, retail, land and anything else we could get away with,” he said. “I opened Ken Smallwood and Associates in 2000 and decided to focus on just land.”
Donna is the vice president at Vanguard Realty/GMAC Real Estate and is mainly in charge of the recruiting for the company. The company currently has offices in Orange Park, Argyle, Fleming Island, Mandarin, Southside, Julington Creek, Intracoastal West and are getting ready to open several offices at the beach.
“We hope to recruit about 200 more agents,” said Donna.
Vanguard Realty Inc./GMAC Real Estate has started a new program called Business Without Boundaries, a home office program.
“We have hired Realtors from all areas in the city and we plan to open offices all over the city for our agents,” said Donna. “The agents we are looking for are an exceptional group. They are experienced enough to want to start their own teams or their own offices. We try to give them that opportunity under the umbrella of Vanguard Realty Inc./GMAC Real Estate.”
Donna said that even though her job is demanding right now, it is more rewarding than anything.
“I absolutely love it,” she said. “The people that we are recruiting for this program have to do over $2 million in sales a year. These are people who know what they are doing and are experienced at what they are doing. These people are very independent people and it is amazing the ability they have to market themselves and to be creative.”
Donna started in real estate in the 1970’s with Pete Dalton, broker of Vanguard Realty/Better Homes and Gardens, in administration. She and her husband left Orange Park to move to Texas when his job transferred him there.
They returned to Orange Park in 1982. In the early 1990’s, Donna got her real estate license and went to work for ERA John Gray Realty for about a year.
Dalton called her and asked her to come back to work for him running his Kingsley office.
“When I was first working managing, I was hiring new agents and recruiting new agents,” she said. “It was really fun to take someone who had just came in and had no idea, but thought they wanted a career in real estate. I watched them grow and blossom or not make it. It was a mothering kind of thing.”
She managed the Kingsley office while Dalton managed the new Fleming Island office. When they found a manager for the Fleming Island office, they moved the corporate office back to the Kingsley location and she became the vice president.
Ken’s not the only one to hold offices. Donna was the vice president of the Southwest Council of the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors in 1999 and 2000.
Donna and Ken met in high school in Alabama, though it was not love at first sight.
Actually, they had a date set up while in high school, but Ken stood Donna up. He had broken up with a recent girlfriend when he made the date and had since gotten back with her by the time of the date, so he didn’t go.
It took three years for the two to meet up again, which they did at a party when Ken returned from the Navy and they haven’t left each other’s side since.
“I went by this little get-together for Ken and he was totally different,” she said. “We met again and since then he has totally controlled my life. We were married six months later. Destiny brought us together.”
They live in Orange Park Country Club and have been married for 33 years. They have two daughters and two grandchildren.