About Red Earth Marketing CEO & President John Pinter

A native of the Washington D.C. region, in 1987 John moved to the seaside college town of Wilmington, NC to attend UNCW where he was exposed to all the wonders of coastal life. Far from the endless concrete and beltway traffic, it’s here where his professional story begins.

During his senior year AT UNCW, he was introduced to a friend’s father who was a senior pilot for Piedmont Airlines. He would tell stories of the glamour of aviation, and the places it had taken him, and just like that; John was bitten by the aviation bug.

Once graduated, John focused singularly on becoming a commercial pilot. By 1993 he became licensed, taking any flight logging jobs that were available for him to build hours. From flying vacationers over the beach on sightseeing tours, to delivering planes across the country – that became his life.

One of these experiences involved flying an executive within a large land development company to and from his meetings. Over the months, that gentleman would invite John into the meetings to sit and observe. During those meetings John would observe negotiations, land acquisition discussions, personnel reviews, almost everything within a real estate operation. John credits this period of his life as one of the most impactful for him professionally. “I’m forever grateful to Dave D, for seeing something in a young kid and for taking the time to mentor me, and most importantly for introducing me to the incredible world of land development and home building.”

As a pilot, you’re required to operate with checklists, prescribed manuals, and pre-flight planning. Where in the sales environment, much was left to the individual’s natural sales ability without much training and planning. By applying his processes from his previous life into real estate sales, John quickly ascended within the industry ranks. Over the course of 25 years, he graduated from onsite salesperson to local sales manager, to national sales manager to business owner.

John has been a frequent keynote speaker within industry conferences and continues to refine the Red Earth Sales Process within his authored book The Blueprint of Onsite Sales.

Red Earth Marketing has evolved into the industry’s leading management and marketing support company. Specifically focusing on large scale master-planned community management and marketing, as well as supporting the new home construction segment of the industry. John and his team have worked in nearly all fifty states, including Canada, the Bahamas, St. Thomas, Panama, Belize, and Mexico. They’ve managed and consulted with those building first-time homes, as well as builders and groups representing the finest private clubs and brands in America.

Our company has represented over $3 Billion in transacted real estate and directly manages over $100 million per year in new construction transactions. We have worked with many clients including Credit Suisse, DR Horton, Nicklaus Design, Tiger Woods Design, The Cliffs Communities, Pulte Homes and Bluegreen.

In the early years of Red Earth’s corporate history, John operated primarily as a consultant. He would provide leadership, oversite, and applied expertise towards a client’s objectives. This could mean helping the owners finish up an existing community or completely envision and release a new one. As the company and John’s presence within the industry grew, he began hiring support personnel. “We realized petty quickly with all that we had going on, outsourcing all the moving parts of our business was becoming inefficient. So we began hiring key professionals to help support our managed clients. From graphic designers to architects, these team members are full-time Red Earth employees in-touch with our client’s details daily and speaking the industry language with very little need to translate issues, messages and strategies.” Today our corporate office is based in Wilmington, NC.

“Vision Selling” is a term the Red Earth office uses to design, influence, and creatively sell our clients homes and communities before they are complete. Many of the strategies are in place to represent what something will look like, while the builder designs or builds that entity. Whether it’s a home, a clubhouse, or an entire community, we want to get ahead of completion to help produce pent-up demand and garner activity. A section of the company’s mission statement embodies the directive of:

Representing our client’s neighborhoods, clubs, homesites and homes with forward-thinking creativity and industry-leading, pre-sale based strategies. We enable customers to envision the finished product before completion, thereby mitigating risk and increasing profitability.

This pre-sale mindset is the singular reason that our rendering department has grown at such an accelerated rate. Builders and their sales teams need specific assets to represent a particular home or community before photography can be produced. We produce life-like images of that home’s exterior and interior with incredible accuracy.

While John and Red Earth continue to manage and represent real estate brokerages and communities across the US, the marketing support team is where he gets most excited for the future.

“On any given day our team is working with a builder or developer team on projects all over the country. To see the creativity and results of our work impacting small and large firms is extremely fulfilling. We provide services for each client in different ways, from designing just a site plan or providing a rendering one time to overall management. We have created a one-stop, ‘select-what-you-need support company’ full of capable professionals.”

As a pilot, John gets the opportunity to visit sites across the country. This frequent access to some of the best organizations and some of the most interesting markets has continued to provide John with a unique insight and perspective on what’s happening and working in the industry. He loves all things aviation as evidenced by his boat name “Aviator” and his award-winning model airplane collection which includes a WWII radial engine quarter scale plane, and a 75lb, scale twin-jet engine Navy F-18. And no, they are not just for display, as John travels regionally bringing them to different airshows.

Life at home for John is full as well. He stays busy as a father planning adventures for his four daughters, Maddie, Ireland, Elle and Dylan. His wife Tara, the love of his life, keeps him busy socially. She plans all of their family vacations, the last being an epic trip through Yellowstone National Park.

“Tara doesn’t let grass grow under our feet! Many times, she meets me at the airport and says, ‘I brought you a change of clothes, don’t you remember we have that concert tonight?’ After I complain for a bit, I do my part to fall in line. But she knows me, she knows I need that push to the next adventure, and to her credit 100% of the time she hits a home run with whatever experience she has planned; and I love her for that!”

In the end, John and Red Earth are most proud of the company’s stellar record of success and reputation.

“We have always done the right thing for our clients. Regardless of the situation, or economy, I am pleased to know that our clients would say that our company over-delivered expectations. To me that’s the only way to have success and have a future, by over-delivering whatever the situation dictated.”