“People build deep relationships with other people and then I’d say the next tier is they build relationships with the land,” says Jeff Fisher MEM’00.
Forging both kinds of relationships is what Fisher and his partner Guenevere Abernathy do. Their real-estate company, Unique Places, based in Durham, N.C., is a hybrid of a nonprofit land trust and a for-profit real estate developer. Since 2005, Fisher and Abernathy have worked with landowners and investors to protect land in the Southeast.
Protecting Lands and Preserving Heritage
In 2007, Sam Whitehurst turned to Unique Places for help with his 2,000 acres in Craven County—property acquired by the family centuries ago from a king’s land grant. With a new highway cutting through an area that was experiencing a growth spurt, Whitehurst was concerned about encroaching development. The property, well-managed for generations, was in good shape.
“We were going to lose the land and the way we own it,” says Whitehurst. “And more importantly, the public was going to lose.”
To prevent such losses, he began working with a land trust to see what incentives were available.
“It’s very hard work for all concerned,” says Whitehurst. “A lot of negotiations and a lot of agreements had to be made. I tried.”
He also found it time-consuming, and even though he was driven by a “deep family feeling of wanting to protect that property,” progress was slow, results inchoate. That’s when he hired Unique Places, which helped turn Whitehurst’s vision into reality.
“People inherently know it’s important to protect their land—it’s like a book of who they are, their family’s heritage,” Fisher says. “Unique Places helps landowners achieve that preservation, while maximizing their return on the land. When protection is good for water quality and clean air, the private and public meet at the same place.”
Whitehurst was pleased with the results. Working with a land trust and state and federal partners, Fisher helped carve out a conservation plan that turned 135 acres of wetlands and longleaf stands into a county nature park, added 430 acres to a state-owned natural area, and protected 181 acres of forest through a working-lands conservation easement.
Turning Conservation Assets Into Protected Land and an Income Source
Conservation easements and carbon sequestration are “externality” concepts that Fisher studied in the Resource Economics and Policy tract at the Nicholas School.
Matching up properties with appropriate externalities—often unknown commodities to landowners who hold them—is one of Unique Places’ specialties. Fisher and Abernathy bring their experience with land trusts, real estate law, and conservation funding to identify which payments, tax credits, tax deductions, cash opportunities and other incentives landowners can tap to derive value from their land while maximizing conservation.
Fisher’s time at the Nicholas School laid the cornerstone for his work.
“Duke played a large part in my decision to pursue a business like Unique Places,” says Fisher. “What has been very exciting is to take those academic terms I learned at the Nicholas School and turn them into real-world projects and specifically land conservation.”
It’s a complex process. But Fisher and Abernathy are fluent in translating different land management practices into landowner transactions that generate value and institute long-term conservation. Their conservation plans allow landowners to preserve history and conserve their land’s ecosystem assets far into the future while carrying community benefits such as clean air, clean water and viewsheds.
“If you’re in the Falls Lake watershed,” explains Fisher, “which is where Raleigh gets all its drinking water, the actions that an individual landowner can take to protect water quality provide benefits all the way downstream, and all people drinking that water benefit.”
Unique Places Founded to Boost Funding and Land Conservation
Before joining forces on their entrepreneurial venture, Fisher and Abernathy both worked for different land trusts. Abernathy, who holds a masters degree in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management from N.C. State University, had managed land-trust projects at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Triangle Land Conservancy.
Fisher, who got his law degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, while getting his MEM from Duke, had worked for both TNC and Tar River Land Conservancy. Prior to Unique Places, they raised a total of some $95 million in land conservation funding and helped protect $150 million of real estate. What spurred their desire to go into business was their observation that there was too little funding for the conservation potential.
They struck upon the same forprofit idea independently; then Fisher pitched Abernathy his idea of a business partnership over coffee.
Says Abernathy, “He put a project in front of me that I really wanted to work on. And I knew it would be better to be working together on a bigger picture because we both had different strengths we bring to the table.”
That project was an expansion of North Carolina’s Chimney Rock State Park—259 acres that would link disjointed parkland on the edge of the ecologically rich Blue Ridge Mountains. The sticking points involved three separate landowners, property already on the market with interested developers, and conservation partners without enough funds to buy. Unique Places ended up purchasing the land and then selling it to a conservancy that went on to sell the land to the state.
The success of Chimney Rock was all it took for Fisher and Abernathy, who had worked and socialized in the same circles for years, to realize the benefits of becoming partners.
Today, after just five short years of existence, their eight investment and 28 consulting projects add up to roughly $6 million of private investment capital and 7,000 acres of protected lands.
Unique Places’ Real Estate Offerings
While there are companies that focus on different pieces of what Unique Places does—such as wetlands mitigation and real estate investment—Fisher does not “believe there are other companies that do what we do, which is to combine consulting expertise with real estate investment to conserve land with a for-profit model.”
Certainly the many hats the two partners wear are impressive.
To accurately assess a given property, Fisher and Abernathy get to know the land inside and out, and that means walking it and recognizing its many features.
“Walking around with ecologists and hydrologists so that I’m able to converse at their level lends a lot of credibility,” says Fisher, adding, “and that’s where all the advanced biology, watershed hydrology, and dendrology studies at Duke come in handy.”
Critical to his work is his knowledge of geographic information systems or GIS.
“GIS courses I took at the Nicholas School were definitely the most practical skill,” says Fisher. “Everything about conservation real estate has to do with maps so the ability to make a map or read one is essential.”
For each project, Unique Places creates a “property atlas,” which lists all the conservation assets that they and their partners have identified. They assemble all these data into separate maps, detailing all aspects of the land from soil type, elevation, slope, viewshed analysis, wetlands, hydrology, and forestlands to natural heritage elements.
Then looking at it from a planning perspective, they lay out a range of potential scenarios for the property—from the undesired (maximizing development) to the desired (maximizing conservation) and everything in between. They present this to the client, who then has decision-making to do.
His position, says Fisher, is truly a combination of being a biologist, watershed hydrologist, a GIS specialist and a real estate developer.
Of the many roles they play in the process, problem solver might be the best overarching description for their work.
In the case of Poole farm, Unique Places was brought in to resolve the problem of putting farmland protections on land owned by five married siblings, some of whom wanted to sell. Unique Places’ solution was first to buy the property, then enlist a handful of partners to purchase conservation easements. The end result was 89 acres of permanently protected open space and development limited to just six homesites on the farm’s least environmentally sensitive lands.
In the case of the Harris farm, Unique Places is helping the Harris Family protect their 3,200 acres in Franklin County, N.C., as working farmland and forestland, while developing a sustainable source of revenue.
Protecting Endangered Species on a Mountain and Water Quality on a Farm
Protecting a land’s conservation values is the driving force behind Unique Places.
“When we talk about land,” explains Abernathy, “we’re also talking about the water that runs through it which is important for drinking water, habitat protection for all types of plants and animals, important air quality that comes from the trees, scenic values, and recreational opportunities—all these things make up a high quality of life for communities.”
When Unique Places was approached to help with TNC’s acquisition of roughly half of a 114-acre tract that was adjacent to a preserve, the project began as a straightforward investment opportunity. Then they stumbled upon a well-hidden asset on the land: the bog turtle, America’s smallest turtle and an endangered species to boot. The discovery changed everything—or at least half of everything. TNC decided to buy the entire tract.
“Now,” says Abernathy “we’re protecting 114 acres instead of 50.”
Seeing the big picture is one of Unique Places’ aims. And though the company tends to take on big projects, they are open to working on innovative projects.
Julia German, who owns 24 acres of her family’s 185-acre working farm, wants to develop a sustainable farm on her property. A recent graduate of Duke Law, Julia has forged a relationship with local tenant farmers, and created an innovative long-term lease agreement that essentially gives her renters the same rights an owner would have. The idea is to eradicate some of the hurdles small farmers typically run into on rented property.
But as ready as the farmers are to begin farming, the German farmland is not. Among many needs are fences for cows and funding for a primary well. Addressing these issues is expensive and yet another reason first-generation farmers struggle to get by.
German knew there was funding for water-quality protections, but she also knew finding those funds was complicated and not unlike the proverbial needle in a haystack. So she hired Unique Places.
“She’s trying to have a viable farm and before she can get paid to get a well, she has to fence all the cattle out,” says Fisher. “There are three different funding sources—some will pay for the well, some will pay for it but only if there’s fencing. It’s very complex.”
German has confidence in the outcome.
She says, “Fisher has the knowledge of how to get from Point A to Point B ‘I have a well.’”
Fisher loves the challenge. It’s one of the many puzzle pieces Unique Places is fitting together for the farm.
“Understanding the land is all about stacking and seeing,” says Fisher. “That’s the way GIS works, layers. You see a big stack of ecosystem assets and you know you have a lot of value there. Then the question is, how do we monetize that for landowners.”
Erica Rowell is managing editor of Dean Chameides’ blog, TheGreenGrok.com. She is based in New York City.
For more about Jeff watch this video produced by Erica Rowell.