NIGEL RICHARDS
Philadelphia & Newport, RI
About Nigel
I started selling real estate in Philadelphia in 2005. Since then I’ve worked through a housing crash, a decade-long boom, a pandemic market that made no sense to anyone, and whatever we’re calling the current one. After twenty-one years and 501 sales, what counts isn’t that I’ve been around. It’s that I’ve priced houses in four very different markets, and I know which advice stops working when conditions change.
Before any of that, I was a DJ. I owned 611 Records, a dance music shop here in Philadelphia, and toured as a techno DJ in 19 countries and every state. People find that funny, and it is. But reading a room and staying calm when the night goes sideways turn out to be most of this job.
I lived in a Northern Liberties loft in the 1990s, back when the neighborhood was mostly empty warehouses and nobody was calling it anything. I watched it fill in block by block, and I’ve sold 53 homes there since. That’s where I learned what an old industrial building can become.
I still do that work myself. I own and run D Street Studios, a creative mill complex on East Tioga Street in North Philadelphia that rents to artists, makers and small companies. I’m now renovating a 90,000 square foot building at 401 E. Allegheny. Before that I bought, renovated and sold rowhouses across the city, and lived in one of them for ten years. So when I walk a property with you, I’m looking at more than the finishes. I’ve dealt with zoning, structure, what a renovation actually costs, and what’s buried in a condo declaration, all with my own money on the line.
Today I work in two places: Philadelphia, and Newport, Rhode Island, where I’m also licensed. Many of my clients have a foot in both, like a city house and a coast house, a move from one to the other, or an estate that has to settle in two states at once. They’d rather deal with one person.
A lot of my work is sales that come with something else attached: a divorce, an estate, a parent moving into care, siblings who inherited a house and don’t agree about it. Those sales need someone who can keep the plan steady while everyone else is having a hard year. On the commercial side, when a client owns a parcel, I can tell them what it’s worth to a developer. That’s often a very different number from what it’s worth to a buyer.
When I’m not working, I’m usually on a tennis court or a boat.
Selling since 2005. Licensed in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island (RES.0048494). Compass RE, 1624 Locust Street, Floor 5, Philadelphia.
