What’s On Your Mind, Richard Mendenhall?

Many think of Richard Mendenhall as the owner of Columbia’s largest real estate firm and, perhaps, as a developer.

Mendenhall sees himself differently: “What I’d like on my tombstone is ‘Teacher and Mentor.’”

That’s what he wanted to be when he returned from the Vietnam War where he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. Mendenhall said he was an indifferent student before the war. No more.

“I’m passionate,” he said, “about all kinds of things,” including community service and speaking to groups on topics from leadership to real-estate trends.

These days, Mendenhall spends much of his time crisscrossing the country to give about 50 presentations a year. When he gives a presentation in Missouri, he doesn’t charge. That’s part of his practice of giving back.

He’s not in the office at RE/MAX Boone Realty very much; his daughter Elizabeth Mendenhall is the CEO and has taken over the day-to-day operations along with his son, Ford Mendenhall, who oversees the company’s computer systems and property management.

When he’s back in town, Mendenhall heads to the non-descript house where he’s lived for decades with his wife, Denise, in a quiet older subdivision. Mendenhall said he doesn’t want to live anywhere but Columbia and likes his home because it overlooks a lake with waterfowl. Wildlife and the outdoors are among his passions.

Another passion, of course, is real estate. In 1974, Mendenhall inherited an agency with a handful of agents from his parents. Today, it’s the area’s largest real estate operation with 120 agents in Columbia and 70 agents in Jefferson City, a RE/MAX sister agency he co-owns.

Mendenhall also helped found Regional Economic Development Inc., or REDI; the Women’s Network, one of the largest branches of the Chamber of Commerce; and the Mizzou Flagship Council, an advocacy group for MU (he’s still on its board). As a former president and current leader in the National Association of Realtors, the nation’s largest trade organization with 1.2 million members, he also helped influence laws and regulations in the real estate industry.

But if you’re a Facebook friend, you’ll see a wider spectrum of Mendenhall’s personality. On his Facebook profile, he lists his interests: “Making PowerPoints, Trout Fishing, Duck Hunting.”

Favorite quote? It’s from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “There’s no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Mendenhall is among the less than 5 percent of Facebook users older than 55, according to insidefacebook.com. Facebook’s statistics do not have a category for older than 65, Mendenhall’s age, presumably because there’s not much to record. Mendenhall also has a Twitter account, though he sheepishly admitted he doesn’t twitter as often as he should. (You can follow him at richard2001.) His most recent twitter is about the book NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children, and it states: “Just read this book, and it is excellent. If you have children or grandchildren, check it out. It will surprise you.” Mendenhall recently become a grandfather, and, as he puts it, he’s head over heels in love.

Mendenhall told CBT that his passion for real estate in Columbia “is not about development. I have never bought a single piece of land for development.”

He’s only been involved with two development projects. One was with his long-time personal friend Jose Lindner. They developed the Forum Shopping Center, but even this involved service and the love of the outdoors. When he and Lindner developed the area, they ceded a portion of the land, which could have been used for commercial ventures, as a buffer for the MKT trail. The other development was with family members and involved rental property. He has since bowed out of both enterprises for lack of time.

Even when he talks about the Forum Shopping Center, he notes that development gives people places to shop, to bank and get their groceries.

Scouts Honor

Mendenhall defines himself by the things that have influenced him, and the first thing he cites is being an Eagle Scout. “It wasn’t easy to be one then, and it’s even harder today,” he said.

On his Facebook page, Boy Scouts show up second in his list of memberships. He’s a member of the Great Rivers Council BSA and the Great Rivers Eagle Scouts.

Mendenhall said being in Boy Scouts also fueled his love of the outdoors and nature, which has remained with him to this day. “There’s something very spiritual about it,” he said. (During one phone interview for this article, he was speaking from a swampy area of his property near Clinton, where he was building a duck blind.)

Nature also influences his view of development. “It’s important that Columbia grow but not too fast,” he said. “No growth would be stagnant.” But Mendenhall believes in balance.

“I love the parks,” he said. Mendenhall has supported the city’s purchase of Stephen’s Park and other greenery in Columbia. These amenities are important because in real estate, Mendenhall explained: “We sell the quality of life in Columbia. We don’t sell houses; we sell homes.”

It’s this attitude and other attributes that gained him the admiration of Mayor Darwin Hindman, a decidedly pro-green booster of Columbia. “He’s a leader and has demonstrated that time and time again,” Hindman said.

The mayor said Mendenhall’s ascendancy to the presidency of the National Association of Realtors “is a real feather in Columbia’s cap.”

Hindman also noted Mendenhall’s co-founding of the University of Missouri Flagship Council, a booster group developed to battle a past attempt to move the University of Missouri’s School of Medicine to Kansas City. Today, the organization has 400 to 500 members and funds a political action committee to lobby the legislature for support for MU.

A Military Education

Mendenhall was an honor student at Hickman High School, a member of the student council and yearbook staff and, during his senior year in 1962, the Sadie Hawkins King (an election decided by female students). He went on to MU, but during his senior year in 1966, the Vietnam War escalated, and he joined the military, a family tradition. His grandfather served in World War I; his father, Hirst Mendenhall, served in World War II and flew 65 missions; and an uncle served in the Korean War.

After basic training, he found himself thinking, “There’s got to be more to it than this.” And there was. He was asked to serve in the Green Berets, known for conducting particularly dangerous, behind-the-lines operations. He liked the motto of the Green Berets: “De Oppresso Liber,” which is Latin for, “To liberate the oppressed.” The reference is to one of their primary missions — to train and advise foreign indigenous forces.

In the Green Berets, he received in-depth training and learned things such as how to take apart and put back together a gun blindfolded.

But Mendenhall learned more than how to handle a gun in Vietnam. “Don’t anybody talk to me about prejudice,” Mendenhall said. “The man who trained me was Hispanic and later went on to receive a Medal of Honor in 1986. My buddy was a black man. My point man was an Asian man, who kept me alive many times. I learned all our blood bleeds red. I have no use for prejudice. I’m alive because of people who are not my skin color.”

The proof shows up on his Facebook page, which lists friends from every walk of life, from artists to plumbers to real estate agents.

His Green Beret experiences still inform his daily life. “Anytime I think I’m having a bad day, I just envision the name of one of my real good friends Doug Mahan etched on the (Vietnam Memorial) wall.”

Before he left for Vietnam, people came up to him at the airport and asked him for his autograph. He was amazed; he hadn’t even served yet, and he was already considered a hero. But when he came back to the U.S. a year later for a 30-day leave, three people tried to spit on him at the Seattle airport. After arriving in Columbia, Mendenhall’s family members talked him into going with them to a local real estate meeting. There he was greeted and embraced; there he felt a sense of community.

Detour: Academia to Real Estate

Still, Mendenhall was determined to teach. A mediocre student when he joined the military, Mendenhall resolved when he returned in 1969 to get his degree at MU, for which he only needed 10 more credits. He got those 10 and another 20 and then a master’s degree in arts education. He left Columbia for Philadelphia, where he planned to work as an assistant professor until he could get his doctorate

Then his daughter, Elizabeth, was born. He didn’t want to raise his little girl in Philadelphia. “I got tired of starving,” he said with a laugh. He decided to come back home to Columbia.

His father had developed the Quarry Heights neighborhood during the 1950s, but Mendenhall wasn’t really interested in real estate or development. Then, his mother, Mary Jane Mendenhall, talked him into attending a national real estate conference. He attended the educational sessions there and learned about a new business model for real estate firms that he thought would make the business better.

Fueled by a progressive idea, he became interested in the real estate business.

Mendenhall thought about it more and realized that by bringing advanced real estate practices to Columbia, he would be able to help his real estate colleagues — and his hometown.

He was hooked.

But he had a couple obstacles to overcome. The new practice he wanted to bring back to Columbia involved recruiting real estate agents and giving them new training, support services, plus a commission. Although his parents owned Boone Realty, a company his mother had taken over from her parents, he couldn’t see how he could sell real estate if he was in competition with his mother or recruit agents if they had to compete with him and his mother.

So in 1974, he made a proposal: What if he managed the company instead of selling real estate? His parents, especially his mother, approved of the plan, but they had a stipulation; he’d have to go without a salary until he recruited enough agents to prove himself and his new idea. Mendenhall said this requirement was one of the best things she could have done because it forced him to work hard.

“It was tough,” he said, and he had to take out loans because he had a family to support. But within a year, he’d proved that his idea could work.

By 1975, Boone Realty had soared to the No. 3 spot in sales in Columbia; by 1976, it was No. 1 in sales, where it has stayed ever since.

Lindner and others pointed out that Mendenhall has a knack for rising to No. 1.

“He has excelled in every task he has ever pursued and risen to the top of every organization in which he has been involved, all the way to the national level,” Lindner said.

Before becoming president of the National Association of Realtors, Mendenhall headed the Columbia Board of Realtors and the Missouri Association of Realtors, and he co-chaired the International Consortium of Real Estate Associations.

The list of other offices Mendenhall has held and accolades he’s earned goes on, but Lindner and others point to one accomplishment as outstanding: his help during the mid-1980s to create the Women’s Network, which has become the largest branch of the Columbia Chamber of Commerce. He had a great role model for the business talents of women — his mother had a business degree from MU when such accomplishments for women were rare.

In 2003, Mendenhall received the Women’s Network Athena award, which honors people who have contributed to women’s accomplishments in business. He’s the only man to have received the Athena award.

But, as Mendenhall notes, awards and accomplishments only mean so much.

Teacher and Friend

For Sheri Radman, Mendenhall has been a mentor and a teacher.

Mendenhall had been a friend of the Radman family for years when Sheri’s husband, Joel, died in 1992. Joel had been working for Mendenhall’s firm as a real estate agent, and Sheri faced life without her husband and her primary source of income. She had three young boys — ages 5, 10 and 13 — to raise as a single parent.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Radman said.

Mendenhall suggested she get her real estate license. She was unsure, and she remembers him telling her: “You can do it. I know you can do it, and I’ll help you do it.” Then, she said, “Pretty soon the books for the classes showed up, and my career got started.”

Today, Radman is the president of the Columbia Board of Realtors, and for years she’s been one of

RE/MAX Boone Realty’s top performing agents.

“Richard had the confidence in me that I didn’t have in myself,” she said. Today, the two of them are colleagues and, of course, Facebook friends.

But his help in getting Radman’s career started is not why she admires Mendenhall so much. Nor does she put his Athena award as a supporter of women at the top of his honors.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Mendenhall, as president of the NAR, created the Realtors Housing Relief Fund, which collected money from real estate agents from across the nation and disbursed it — with no strings and no questions asked — to family members of the victims who had lost their housing or their source of income.

“We cut through all the red tape,” Mendenhall said. “We (the NAR) wanted to make sure they wouldn’t lose their homes.” The fund provided either three months’ worth of rent or mortgage payments. As of 2003, the organization was on record as having given $8.3 million to 1,121 families. Mendenhall said NAR received countless heart-wrenching thank-you letters, which have been turned over to the Smithsonian.

Radman said the fund allowed real estate agents to do something to help those suffering in the country. She said it meant so much to her because she knew what it felt like to be afraid of the possibility of losing her home, to not know what was going to happen. “We knew we could do something to help those directly affected,” she said.

Community Service

In 2005, when the University of Missouri system was toying with the idea of moving the School of Medicine from Columbia to Kansas City, Mendenhall again took action to support something he cared about. He banded with others and founded the University of Missouri Flagship Council in 2005.

“If they had moved the MU Health Sciences, Columbia would have looked like a hurricane had hit it like New Orleans,” Mendenhall said.

Today, the Flagship Council has more than 400 members. Its mission is to support MU and to speak up for the university when it needs help. The council funds a political action committee, which employs two part-time lobbyists. Materials from the council cite its accomplishments as supporting the Caring for Missourians initiative, which will bring $24 million to the university to increase enrollment in medicine, nursing, health professions, optometry, dentistry and pharmacy and support of the conveyance of the Mid-Missouri Mental Health Center to the university.

He also helped in the formation of REDI, Regional Economic Development Inc., which fosters business development in Columbia and Boone County.

Judging by Failure

However, not everything Mendenhall does succeeds. In 2002, Hindman appointed Mendenhall to the Columbia Housing Authority Home Ownership Taskforce. In 2005, Mendenhall and the taskforce recommended using federal funds to demolish public housing units on Park Avenue and replace them with a new development including commercial units, family and senior apartments, townhouses and housing for seniors and a community center.

Mendenhall said he understood the residents’ reluctance to support the plan. Many might have feared a replication of the 1970s-era urban renewal effort, when many people lost their homes and businesses along the Flat Branch area.

“It never occurred to me how traumatic that must have been,” Mendenhall said. “I had no clue the obstacles would be so hard.”

Finally, after countless meetings and discussions with residents of the Park Avenue area, the plans were abandoned, and federal funding dried up.

“I understand,” Mendenhall said. “That is their home; that is their neighborhood.”

Although the new housing never came to pass, Hindman still sees Mendenhall’s service as a success.

Hindman points to the many public events Mendenhall held and how he often stood up to significant criticism, kindly and gently. Although a lack of funding finally killed the project, the mayor said: “He worked with the community to try and come up with plans, and he stood up and did a terrific job. You don’t judge a man on whether something succeeds or not.”

Mendenhall would agree. On his Facebook page in the section titled, “About Me,” he notes: “I’m just Richard. I believe that titles and accomplishments do not really begin to tell people who you are.