Creating Generational Wealth in Knoxville with Stacey Campfield
Stacey Campfield is a Tennessee politician, TV personality, and real estate mogul and on this episode of ConnectTheKnox, we explore how Stacey was able to build such a dynamic career right here in Knoxville. Stacey explains why he moved to Knoxville...
Stacey Campfield is a Tennessee politician, TV personality, and real estate mogul and on this episode of ConnectTheKnox, we explore how Stacey was able to build such a dynamic career right here in Knoxville. Stacey explains why he moved to Knoxville for the business climate, and how his political career led him to a career in television. Julia and Stacey also discuss Stacey’s real estate portfolio, the opportunity he still sees for investors in Knoxville, and the importance of having realistic expectations when embarking on a career in real estate. Stacey also shares his learnings from becoming a property owner and especially why he feels it’s important to always do right by people and pay it forward by mentoring those looking to build their own real estate careers.
Highlights
00:00 Intro
00:33 Stacey introduces himself and describes how he chose to move to Knoxville from New York for a better business climate
03:31 How Stacey landed his own TV show right here in Knoxville through his political career
09:06 Ad - Dr. Joe Chiro www.goseedoctorjoe.com
09:37 Stacey talks about his real estate portfolio and his business perspective on how he built it and his approach to managing a large portfolio
14:30 The advice Stacey would give to people who want to make money in real estate and how it differs from the success stories you see on TV
20:52 Ad - Just Homes Group Realty Executives
21:27 Stacey shares how he’s mentored other people on building a real estate portfolio
22:39 The opportunity Stacey still sees for growth in Knoxville and where he sees the city being in 5 years
24:56 Julia and Stacey discuss the importance of doing the right thing as a landlord and how that builds loyalty and referrals for your business
27:15 Stacey answers Julia’s lightning round of questions about his favorite local Knoxville spots
29:34 How people can find Stacey’s show and connect with him
Links Mentioned in this Episode:
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brighteon.com: https://www.brighteon.com/
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php
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therealitycamp.com: https://therealitycamp.com
Connect with ConnectTheKnox
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Or wherever you listen to Podcasts
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- Buy or Sell a home in Knoxville -
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Just Homes Realty Group: www.justhomesgroup.com
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Find my Home Buyers & Home Sellers Guide here: https://linktr.ee/thejuliahurley
Transcript
Julia: Hey everybody and welcome to Connect the Knox. I’m your host, Julia Hurley, and today’s guest is one of my favorite all-time former politicians, Stacey Campfield. Stacey, thank you so much for being on our show.
Stacey: Hurricane, great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
Julia: [laugh]. The Hurricane was my nickname and it still kind of stuck [laugh].
Stacey: I’m not letting go. I’m going to keep you to it.
Julia: That’s okay. I love it. I love it. Listen, Stacey, let’s start this whole thing off with where you’re originally from and how you ended up in Knoxville.
Stacey: Sure. Well, my family goes back to first families in Tennessee. So, my grandparents, aunts and uncles were here. My mom was born and raised here, but she wanted to learn to snow ski, so she went up north, ended up getting a job for, she thought was going to be a short-term thing. Ended up getting a good job in New York because the schools were very good at the time there and not as good here.
And ended up getting married, had us. We’d spend our summers in Tennessee and I finally just said, you know, I love Tennessee much more than New York. I realized I mean, I was getting—I really from a very young age, I could see differences between Tennessee and New York. Not that New York’s a terrible place and the people in New York are terrible people. It has some very positive things, too, but I got to a point and I said, well, the business climate in New York was terrible.
And I don’t think it’s much better now because I know a lot of people there. It was just, it was a dying community and a dying state. I said, the bus—and I wanted to be in business. I was in business for myself up in New York. I was working myself pretty much to death and not getting anywhere.
And I said, I’m working all the time just to pay all the taxes for New York City, which is what happens in upstate New York. And I was working nonstop. And I said, I can go to Tennessee, the business climate is good, the weather’s world’s better, and the girls are pretty. You know, what other choices do you need? I mean, that’s—you know, you’re a young man or whatever you say, those are the three things in life. What am I waiting for? Why am I here? Is it just because I love filling my shoes with sludge every winter and freezing myself to death and working a lot for the government? No, no. And the girls weren’t very nice? [laugh].
So, I said, I’m going to Tennessee where everybody’s nice, friendly, everybody says hello, everybody talks to you. And I’m going to come down there. And I did. I really just came down with me in a pickup truck. I had a business, I sold it up in New York.
I had a couple of dollars, but really virtually nothing… more or less, just enough to get my foot down and a place to stay for a little while I got myself started. [I’m like 00:02:47] a lot of people, you know, when I was young, I started with those crap jobs that everybody has, you know, I was a lifeguard for a while and did some other things just working for other people, pool boy, whatever it took to survive at the time. It was sort of interesting because, you know, that time in my life, you know, I made a lot of new friends, which was great, met a lot of really nice people, but I really never looked back and said, boy, I still wish I was in New York. I never had that problem. I never was like, boy, I wish—what I gave up. Oh, my gosh, I have a great thriving little business, you know, and it was going great. I never looked back and said no. I just, I always look back and say moving to Knoxville or Tennessee in general, was the best decision I ever made in my life.
Julia: I love to hear that. So, many people that are here from out of state say the exact same thing. It’s like, once they’re here, they never leave. But we still hear from people all the time, why Tennessee? And it’s almost as if people cannot connect what is so special about Knoxville versus everywhere else. So, I appreciate that story. It’s a fantastic story.
Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now, though because I love that you have your own TV show. So, talk to us about how kind of you got into that situation at this moment.
Stacey: Sure. I mean, really—and in your case, you’re wondering brighteon.com, that’s where I’m at. That’s the channel that I’m on. The show is called The Reality Camp. I didn’t come up with a name but it’s a good name, I guess. It’s just fun. We just have fun with it. Really a lot of is sprung from politics. I was in politics for a decade in Knoxville. And that was another nice thing about Knoxville. They were very welcoming to someone who literally probably was not—I wasn’t born there. I moved down when I was about 25 and said, you know, hey, this is where I want to live.
And people were very welcoming. And they were very open to having someone like me just—you know, you can call me carpetbagger; I’ve been called worse, you know, but they didn’t really care. They were like, hey, if you’re willing to work and you’re willing to do the stuff, you know, God bless you, we’ll take you. And I got into politics and made a couple of friends through that. And the guy who ran the TV station, I literally ran into him, I’m not sure if people know what fanboy is, but it’s, like, a show of old movie stars and stuff like that, you can meet all these people and stuff like that.
I just happened to be walking through one day and this guy had a booth to set up and he’s like, “Hey, you’re Stacey Campfield.” Was like, “Yep.” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m a big fan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And he—I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he’s like, “Well, do TV shows and stuff like that and I do films for, like, movies and stuff like that,” he did all this production work stuff. And I said, “Oh, that’s really cool.”
And he said, “Well, you want to come up and be on our show one time? And we’d love to have you.” Because we had a lot of pretty big name, pretty decent-sized name people coming up there and talking politics. I said, “Well, sure. I’ll come up, check out your show. Sure. I’d love to see your station, see what you have.”
And Alan Keyes was there. I’m not sure if you remember Dr. Alan Keyes. He was a presidential candidate back in the Bush era. I’ll just talk about him and being vice president for Bush, the first Bush, but you know, things like that. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don’t. Very sharp mind. He was an ambassador for Ronald Reagan in two different countries. And he said, “Hey, why don’t you come up and we’ll [unintelligible 00:06:12] on the show.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, sure.” [unintelligible 00:06:14] that’s a great honor, you know, get this major player like that.
And I said, “Okay, sure. I’ll sit in on the show.” So… the—it was almost sort of funny because the host of the show is this just a good guy. But it was three people: it was me, Alan Keyes and the host of the show. Well, the host this show comes in here and says, “Well, this is Stacey Campfield, local politician, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Did this—their thing, “And Dr. Alan Keyes. Guys, how you doing?” I said, “Good.”
And he’s like, “What do you think about Donald Trump?” And I just started talking. And I promise you, he gets up and just walks off the stage. So, it’s just me and Alan Keyes. And I’m just [unintelligible 00:06:54]. And I’m like, “Uh, aren’t you supposed—the host supposed to be here for this?” And I’m literally talking to him for, like… I mean, literally like an hour.
And I’m like, “Okay.” I was thinking it was going to be, like, a two-minute little chit-chat thing. And it’s an hour and I was like, “Well, you know, I got to get going, guys. Uh, I guess we’re closing out the show.” Literally, they like, threw me to the wolves. And we closed out the show talking with Alan.
And I got off, I was like, “What the heck was that?” And they’re like, “We wanted to see how you handled pressure, if you could just talk spontaneously on the spot.” I said, “Well, I guess I had to. I had no other choice besides sit there looking dumb.” And he said, “Well, you did good. You passed the test, so how’d you like to have your own show?”
And I was like, “Really?” And they’re like, “Yeah,” well, you know, we did my own show a little bit, and I’d co-host with Alan Keyes a lot. For years, we did that back and forth. We had a good debate going on where we’d debate different issues. And they said, you know, I’m not saying—I’m not, like I say, I’m super funny guy, but they’re like, “You’re very spontaneous and comedy relief, where Alan is very strict and standard and solid.” He said, “How’d you like to do a show with something lighter?”
And I said, “You know, that’s pretty much what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to show because I always believe the lighter, softer, fun side of politics is still out there.” So, many people say, “Oh, you can’t talk about politics.” Oh, yes, you can. It’s a fun—I love the topic. It can be fun. It can be funny. And it—mean, shoot, just look at the stuff that’s going on now. It’s sometimes you want to cry, but you know, there’s a lot of funny stuff in there, too.
So, we started with The Reality Camp and it’s just been fun. We’re literally bringing up, talking about news stories, more or less making fun of some of the politicians of the day, whatever the story is going on right now. Right now with Paul Pelosi, we did a whole thing on Hammer time and we had MC Hammer out there busting a move and we just talked about fun stuff. That was—it really just, one thing sort of bled over into the other. So, I’m lucky with my job and my profession. I have plenty of free time I can do stuff like this and have fun. And Knoxville is really been a blessing to me.
Julia: Well, some better I know many people don’t know about you that I know because I’m your real estate agent is that you are a, what I would personally consider a real estate mogul. And people use that word for only people who have high rises. You have hundreds of properties. How did you accumulate and how do you manage that in such a small town like Knoxville without a con—like, you just have such a good base and an eye for growing businesses. Can you give some people some advice on that and kind of how you do that?
Stacey: Yeah. I mean it really [laugh]—the best advice I ever got was from my cousin who said, “Stacey, if you want to make it in real estate, all you need is a strong back and a weak mind.” Well, I qualified. So, I guess you here I am. And you know, and the more I look back and I said you know he’s probably pretty right because you have to be able—when you’re young, you have to be able to work a little bit and get your hands dirty a little bit and do the things needed to learn how to do this trade.
And then you have to have a weak mind in that when something doesn’t go right, when something’s going wrong, when you’re completely burned out, you have to be able to just say, “Psht, okay, I’m not going to think about that anymore. Forget it, I don’t need that anymore. I can… delete that, from my memory banks and just move forward, keep moving forward.” It was really sort of funny, I came down, I bought a ten-plex, with my cousin and that didn’t work out [laugh] at all. So, I was literally flat broke after that deal happened.
And I bought my first house, I promise you, it was $700. I bought my first house for $700. It was condemned, it was in terrible shape. It lived right across the street from my cousin who gave me that advice. And I just literally had to track the person down who owned it, which took time. I mean, it literally took me months and months of I mean, sometimes you can go to the courthouse to get the records and find the person and then call them up say, “Hey, do you want to sell this house?”
And there’s a million people doing it right now. I pretty much did that process, but literally, I had to talk to a cousin who talked to, you know, the uncle talked to the brother-in-law who finally said, “Hey, I own it. I’ve been wanting to sell it, but my uncle…” whatever, the one guy who didn’t want anybody else to get it except his buddy, so he kept stringing me along for months and months and months. And then he finally just gave up on his buddy and I finally got through. I literally bought the house for 700 bucks because it was in rough shape.
First house, like, into—like, anybody, when you’re starting a new trade, you really don’t know very much. I knew a very little bit. I had been an electrician’s helper for a couple of months, which more or less taught me enough how to wire a house roughly. It’s not rocket science. I always tell people everything you see done in—so many people are so intimidated; is not as hard as you think.
I mean, obviously, electrical, you don’t want to stick screwdrivers and outlets and stuff like that, but I imagine if you took somebody who has a little bit of training, within a day or two, you can know the fundamentals of how to do just about everything on a house. I did my first house, I got it done. I said, “That was terrible. I hated it. I’m never going to do it again. Never, never, never, never, never.”
And then I moved into it. And I was poor at the time. And I said, well, wait a second. I had—it was a three-bedroom house. I was renting out the other two bedrooms. And I said, you know, wait a second. These other two guys are paying what it cost me to fix up this house and I’m living for free. So, this is awesome.
So, about six months later, somebody came to me said, “Hey, I got another house for sale if you want one.” I said, “Sure. Why not? I guess. Maybe… yeah, maybe. Okay, I’ll take it.” Because it was such a good deal. I bought it, fixed it up. I rented it out. And I said well, wait a second. This is paying all my living expenses from—I pay off the mortgage and I have enough left over to more or less put money in my pocket, and it pays for my electrical, it was paying for my food, my housing, everything, was now at this point, I’m living pretty much free. So, I said, “Huh.”
So, I got a third house, the third house came to me and I got the third house. And I started doing it. I said, okay, this is a system. It’s not just me working, I got more people working and one guy helping me, and we finished it a little quicker. Got the third house done. I said, now I’m just making pure profit.
And I started thinking myself, well, how many of these do you want? Because at this point on, you realize it’s a system. You put a little bit of money in. Once you get that first one done, it pays for itself. And you get 10, 20, 30, 40, however many you like. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing is just growing one after the other.
Now, if people will get into real estate, there’s a couple of things, and I guess this is part of your show, we can talk about some of the problems with being in real estate, versus watching real estate on TV. And I’m sure you’ve seen this a million times. Some people will say, “Oh, I want to be in real estate,” or, “I want to be a salesman,” or, “I want to sell real estate,” or, “I want to do rental properties,” or whatever. It’s all well—you know, it looks great on a TV show—or, “I want to flip houses.” That was the hot one a couple of years ago, “I want to just flip houses and make hundreds of thousands of dollars every house I flip. I watch these guys on TV and they’re done in 30 minutes. You know the house is done and maybe it takes them a week or two, but it’s finished and they made a hundred thou—200,000, $300,000.”
It’s not like that. It’s not like that. I always tell people, everything you think is going to happen is going to cost you twice as much and take you twice as long, if you’re lucky. If not longer than that. Especially on your first one or two. I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve realized, it’s not… it’s not always smooth, you’re always going to hit bumps in the road, there’s always going to be something you have to take care of you didn’t think of.
Which they show those in those shows, but what you don’t see in those TV shows is when the husband and wife are done breaking the little hole on the wall that they finally, you know, their first little effort on the house. After that, you know, after their ten-minute cameo TV time, they have a crew of 50 guys that come in and really just slam out the house and get it done. But I tell people, anybody can do it. You just got to be patient with yourself. My first house took me a year to do it because it was pretty much just me doing it.
But that was so key because I learned how to do every trade, a little bit at least enough to realize, okay, I can do electrical; this is what needs to get done to get this up and running. This is what I need for plumbing. This is how you do sheetrock. This is how you hang sheetrock. This is what you need to do for framing. You learn all those things in your first house, or maybe two houses, maybe three houses.
You learn all those things and then it’s so key because when you go to contractors and a contractor comes in, says oh, I want to do the electrical or I want to do the plumbing or I want to do this, and they say hey, your bid is $8000, $10,000, you can say, “Well, wait a second. I could do that work with me and another guy and have it done in three days and it’s, you know, maybe 500 or 1000 bucks.” So, you can start making value judgments based on how you want to do these things and how you want to make money. And that’s pretty much what you learn your first couple houses. So, keep that in mind.
Now, I’m getting to a stage in my career. It’s very interesting what I’ve been able to do. Before I was always doing one to the other to the other, just buying one house, fixing it up, renting it out, and as more money came in, I’d buy another house, fix it up, rent it out. A lot of people have done things where they flip the first couple houses. I have a buddy of mine, who I got—I’m not going to say I got him started. He says I got him started but he had the motivation to do it… [unintelligible 00:17:09] huh? Yeah, I should. Yes, I made him everything he is. He’s a multimillionaire now and has hundreds of houses and it’s all because I helped him with his first house a little bit.
I’d like to take the credit, but I really can’t. But he sold his first couple of houses where I just hung on to mine. He’s up in Middle Tennessee area. He flipped a few which made him very liquid, which made it easy for him to get past the onesie-twosies, one at a time stage. What I’m finding now, and it’s really turned into the hot ticket for, really, everybody, I’m seeing people are now doing seminars on it, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for about 15 or 20 years, it’s really now just coming into vogue.
After the crash, 2008 real estate crash, so many people, so many big banks took a beating, they would not lend on investment property. And I had all these houses I said, you know, I own all these houses, they’re all free and clear. They’re all bringing in positive income. My credit score is good. Let’s move forward.
What I want to do is start borrowing and buying multiple, multiple, multiple houses. All the big banks were so gun-shy after the crash, none of the big banks would do it. I finally went to a small bank and had a lot of success. Small bank said, “We’re here for you. What do you want to do?” And I said—and it’s become incredibly popular. I mean literally people are—what you’re going to hear on this show right now is what people are charging thousands of dollars to get private seminars for are charging hundreds of dollars just to do a mass seminar.
What people are doing now is they’re buying a property, let’s just say… let’s just say you can buy a house—I’m just going to throw some ballpark numbers—80,000 dollars you can buy a beat up house, okay? And then maybe it’s going to cost you another $20,000 to fix it up. These are just ballpark numbers. This is not anything. But okay, you have $100,000 invested in a property.
What you do is you go to the bank and say hey, “I need the $100,000. I’ve got this house; I fixed it up”—usually your first one’s hardest you get it done—you borrow the money. There’s a lot of deals for first-time homebuyers. You get the loan for that house.
Now, you have $100,000 invested in it but what you have now is not a $100,000 house. You have a $150,000 house because you have—your initial investment was 80, you put in 20. That’s not the value of your house any longer. The value of your house now has gone from $100,000 or $80,000, it’s almost doubled in value, say maybe $150,000. You have $50,000 of pure profit. $50,000 of equity in that house. You go back to the bank. The bank will say, “Hey, if you’d like another 100 grand, you have to put $20,000 down.” You’ve got $50,000. So, how many houses at 20,000 apiece can you get with 50,000? You can get at least one, maybe two—that’s a little Spock thing going on there—and have ten grand left over.
Julia: We all know that real estate is location, location, location. Our team at Just Homes Group Realty Executives have the true expertise, pairing buyers and sellers with the right opportunities. Whether you’re looking to buy or sell a home right here in Knoxville, Lenoir City, Clinton, or Farragut, we have the expertise throughout every Knoxville surrounding area. Call just Homes Group Realty Executives today.
Julia: Right. Makes total sense. Is this kind of how you’ve done this process the whole time?
Stacey: It’s really—well, like I said, when I first got started, I was onesie twosie-ing, just one after the other after the other. Now, it’s growing very quickly. I mean, I’ve got, like, six houses I’m working on right now. I’ve got other properties, I’ve got two or three other [bear 00:21:14] properties just waiting to go. So, it’s going very quickly right now and growing very quickly right now.
But literally, I mean, you can do this. It’s not rocket science. You just have to be patient. And I tell people all the time, I have friends who live in other states, I have people who live in Knoxville. And I say hey, if you want to come and sit down and do lunch sometime, you buy me a hamburger or take me out to eat somewhere, I’ll sit down and we’ll just do the whole plan for you.
And I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had some people who’ve taken me up on it and some have become very successful. Some people just like to hear it and maybe they’ll get four or five, six rental properties and they’re making good money. They’re happy. God bless you, you know? I’m happy to add some stability to somebody’s life. But the return on investment on real estate and property is so astronomical, at least in Knoxville. And every market is different. I make no guarantees.
Julia: That’s a good point. Do you feel like Knoxville is still an opportunity zone, like, for investors? Has it reached his peak? Are we still growing? Do we still have opportunity?
Stacey: Well, Knoxville is still growing and it has been a very hot town. I mean, we’re not like Nashville, which is ridiculous. I mean, the numbers there are just jumping by huge leaps and bounds. I mean, the numbers are doubling every couple of months. It seems like here, it’s still somewhat reasonable.
You can still buy inexpensive houses and fix them up. I’m not really big on the big expensive places. I don’t think there’s as—you can make margins on that for rental and stuff like that. I think smaller two-bedroom, three-bedroom houses, more family-style houses, you can make good money on. There’s plenty of room sti—there’s always room to make money. Listen… [sigh] I still, I look at all these other places and they’re all trying to catch up to what Tennessee is doing.
Julia: I agree with that one hundred percent. One hundred percent. So, goal for the next five years. We know Knoxville is going to continue to grow, we know that there’s opportunity here, we know that more people are coming here for opportunity. Where do you see Knoxville in five years?
Stacey: Growing really quickly. Right now, our downtown has already exploded. It became a hippie, tren—hipster trendy area, which I—you used to be able to shoot a gun down the main street of downtown at eight o’clock at night and you wouldn’t hit anybody. You could stand on one end and shoot a shotgun and not hit a thing. You used to be able to buy a whole floors of major buildings for $10,000.
Obviously, those days are gone. I mean, now it’s you know, $200 a square foot type thing for the downtown trendy spaces, but you can still get many, many houses on the outskirts of town. I think a lot of that smaller two-bedroom, three-bedroom houses are still growing, people are still coming into Tennessee, which is great for people in rental. There’s not enough houses. If you have one, your rentals are going—I mean mine, I hate to say it, almost, some of them have probably doubled in the last three, four years.
I don’t up them on people when they’re in there, but if they move out, I go up to whatever the current value is. Some of them have doubled in value in the last four or five years, I’d say. That market is still available. There’s always still [ability there 00:24:19].
Julia: I want to say something right there because I think that this is something that people don’t know about you that I’m going to share. And I hope you don’t mind me sharing this because I find it really important. I don’t raise my rents on my people vary—like, maybe $50 a year until they move out and then I also go to market, right? And that creates loyalty and they bring the other renters and it creates a situation where people know that you are a trustworthy person. And I bring renters to you all the time and you’ve gone above and beyond for some student athletes that no one else would help.
You don’t ask for accolades. You don’t ask for pats on the back. You always do the right thing. And I think that is an attractive thing for Knoxvillians to know that when you connect with the right people in this town—that’s the name of this podcast: Connect the Knox—that you’re going to get taken care of and you can do a handshake deal and there are people here that will still honor that system. So, I want to just point that out and say thank you because I’ve always appreciated that about you, and I think that’s really great thing.
Stacey: Well, you’re very kind. And I’ve been very blessed, so I do not mind sharing that blessings to others. You know, I don’t have to do another house for the rest of my life. I’m very well taken care of. I could take care of myself for the rest of my life with no problems doing anything. I do this to help people because I enjoy it.
I, literally the first time ever, all the taxes went up in the city of Knoxville about 50% or 100%, and for the first time ever, I had to tell people hey, guys, I hate doing this. Some of you have been with me for five years, saying, “I hate to do this, but my rents are going to have to go up.” And I didn’t go very much. I went up maybe 100 bucks a month at most. And literally I thought, “Man, everybody’s going to be mad, everybody’s going to leave, everybody’s just going to hate me because I’m upping rents at the end of their lease.”
And every single person to a one, said, “We understand. That’s very kind of you to only up it that much. So, many other people are jumping at a whole bunch more. We appreciate you.” And it was just, made me feel good that people could see hey, the other side of it is I’m not doing this—you know, I could have really jacked it on them, you know and said, “Hey, you know the markets gone up 25%, so you know, your rents going up 25%.” And to me, it was like a 5% raise or increase in rents. And everybody was really good about that. I was really pleased at how everybody took it and—
Julia: Well, you have the southern mentality, and when you treat people right, people treat you right, and I think that that’s something that is very… it’s such a good thing. So, we only have three minutes left.
Stacey: Three. Go.
Julia: So, here’s what we’re going to do. Three.
Stacey: Three [crosstalk 00:26:43].
Julia: So, we got favorite restaurant in Knoxville?
Stacey: Favorite restaurant is probably—well what kind of food?
Julia: Any food. What’s your favorite thing?
Stacey: You know what Knoxville needs? What—Knoxville needs a good Italian restaurant? We don’t have a good—we got great barbecue. Awesome barbecue. We got okay pizza.
Julia: I didn’t ask you what Knoxville needed. I said what is your favorite restaurant?
Stacey: I’m telling you, if there’s anybody out there from an Italian restaurant family, you need to come to Knoxville. You will be rich. You will make an everloving fortune if you make good Italian food. There’s [unintelligible 00:27:18] that’s what we need. All right.
Best—there’s a couple pizza places I like a lot. You know I have a garbage gut stomach, so I’ll eat just about anywhere and anytime… gosh, favorite restaurant. Umm… I’m trying to think the last place I went. There’s so many good places in Knoxville. There really are.
There’s a lot of trendy new restaurants and you can go on and on and on about them. Oh, there’s a pizza place off of Broadway and I cannot remember the name of it right now. It’s escaping my mind, but I really liked their veggie supreme pizza. There’s a place called La Herradura which is Mexican food. I love them. They literally grew from a taco truck to two taco trucks to five taco trucks.
Now, they have, like, two different restaurants and five taco trucks. And they’re just doing—
Julia: Where is this?
Stacey: There’s one—the one—there’s one near my house, which is great for them because I hit that place up probably three times a week. La Herradura is a yellow taco truck on Broadway. There’s one there. There’s—or on Merchants. There’s a store, or one of their hard locations is on Broadway. There’s one on Kingston Pike, one of their taco trucks. There’s one in South Knoxville. They’re all over the place. But they’re really good. They took over an old Chick-fil-A up near West Town Mall. They’re really good Mexican food. Awesome Mexican food.
Julia: Okay, I’m going to check out the La Herradura near West Town Mall. That’s the one closest to me, so I’ve never been. And you’re the first person I’ve interviewed that has a restaurant I’ve never been to. So, now I’m excited to try it out. One minute or less. How can people find your website, find you, and be able to connect with you outside of this space?
Stacey: Sure. brighteon.com. It’s spelled like brighteon dot com. You go there. And you go to Stacey Campfield, I’m on Facebook. One of mine just got shut down; a curse on you Mark Zuckerberg. But I’m on Facebook if you want to contact me. If you want to set up a lunch we can set up lunch and I’ll try and show you whatever I can, help you out any way I can. Let’s see, therealitycamp.com. Therealitycamp.com that’s my TV show. And thank you so much for having me on, Julia.
Julia: I love you, Stacey. I think you’re one of my favorite people in Knoxville. If anybody needs to connect with Stacey Campfield, he’s one of my best friends. I’ve got it. If you need some rental information, you need a house, I’ve got a connection for you.
Make sure that you visit Connect the Knox. Thanks for visiting, everybody. Bye.
Thank you for tuning into the show. Make sure to like and subscribe, leave a five-star review on your podcast player of choice, and if you would like information on moving to Knoxville, send me a private message. As always, this is Julia Hurley, connecting Knoxville to the nation.
Julia: Hey everybody and welcome to Connect the Knox. I’m your host, Julia Hurley, and today’s guest is one of my favorite all-time former politicians, Stacey Campfield. Stacey, thank you so much for being on our show.
Stacey: Hurricane, great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
Julia: [laugh]. The Hurricane was my nickname and it still kind of stuck [laugh].
Stacey: I’m not letting go. I’m going to keep you to it.
Julia: That’s okay. I love it. I love it. Listen, Stacey, let’s start this whole thing off with where you’re originally from and how you ended up in Knoxville.
Stacey: Sure. Well, my family goes back to first families in Tennessee. So, my grandparents, aunts and uncles were here. My mom was born and raised here, but she wanted to learn to snow ski, so she went up north, ended up getting a job for, she thought was going to be a short-term thing. Ended up getting a good job in New York because the schools were very good at the time there and not as good here.
And ended up getting married, had us. We’d spend our summers in Tennessee and I finally just said, you know, I love Tennessee much more than New York. I realized I mean, I was getting—I really from a very young age, I could see differences between Tennessee and New York. Not that New York’s a terrible place and the people in New York are terrible people. It has some very positive things, too, but I got to a point and I said, well, the business climate in New York was terrible.
And I don’t think it’s much better now because I know a lot of people there. It was just, it was a dying community and a dying state. I said, the bus—and I wanted to be in business. I was in business for myself up in New York. I was working myself pretty much to death and not getting anywhere.
And I said, I’m working all the time just to pay all the taxes for New York City, which is what happens in upstate New York. And I was working nonstop. And I said, I can go to Tennessee, the business climate is good, the weather’s world’s better, and the girls are pretty. You know, what other choices do you need? I mean, that’s—you know, you’re a young man or whatever you say, those are the three things in life. What am I waiting for? Why am I here? Is it just because I love filling my shoes with sludge every winter and freezing myself to death and working a lot for the government? No, no. And the girls weren’t very nice? [laugh].
So, I said, I’m going to Tennessee where everybody’s nice, friendly, everybody says hello, everybody talks to you. And I’m going to come down there. And I did. I really just came down with me in a pickup truck. I had a business, I sold it up in New York.
I had a couple of dollars, but really virtually nothing… more or less, just enough to get my foot down and a place to stay for a little while I got myself started. [I’m like 00:02:47] a lot of people, you know, when I was young, I started with those crap jobs that everybody has, you know, I was a lifeguard for a while and did some other things just working for other people, pool boy, whatever it took to survive at the time. It was sort of interesting because, you know, that time in my life, you know, I made a lot of new friends, which was great, met a lot of really nice people, but I really never looked back and said, boy, I still wish I was in New York. I never had that problem. I never was like, boy, I wish—what I gave up. Oh, my gosh, I have a great thriving little business, you know, and it was going great. I never looked back and said no. I just, I always look back and say moving to Knoxville or Tennessee in general, was the best decision I ever made in my life.
Julia: I love to hear that. So, many people that are here from out of state say the exact same thing. It’s like, once they’re here, they never leave. But we still hear from people all the time, why Tennessee? And it’s almost as if people cannot connect what is so special about Knoxville versus everywhere else. So, I appreciate that story. It’s a fantastic story.
Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now, though because I love that you have your own TV show. So, talk to us about how kind of you got into that situation at this moment.
Stacey: Sure. I mean, really—and in your case, you’re wondering brighteon.com, that’s where I’m at. That’s the channel that I’m on. The show is called The Reality Camp. I didn’t come up with a name but it’s a good name, I guess. It’s just fun. We just have fun with it. Really a lot of is sprung from politics. I was in politics for a decade in Knoxville. And that was another nice thing about Knoxville. They were very welcoming to someone who literally probably was not—I wasn’t born there. I moved down when I was about 25 and said, you know, hey, this is where I want to live.
And people were very welcoming. And they were very open to having someone like me just—you know, you can call me carpetbagger; I’ve been called worse, you know, but they didn’t really care. They were like, hey, if you’re willing to work and you’re willing to do the stuff, you know, God bless you, we’ll take you. And I got into politics and made a couple of friends through that. And the guy who ran the TV station, I literally ran into him, I’m not sure if people know what fanboy is, but it’s, like, a show of old movie stars and stuff like that, you can meet all these people and stuff like that.
I just happened to be walking through one day and this guy had a booth to set up and he’s like, “Hey, you’re Stacey Campfield.” Was like, “Yep.” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m a big fan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And he—I said, “Well, what do you do?” And he’s like, “Well, do TV shows and stuff like that and I do films for, like, movies and stuff like that,” he did all this production work stuff. And I said, “Oh, that’s really cool.”
And he said, “Well, you want to come up and be on our show one time? And we’d love to have you.” Because we had a lot of pretty big name, pretty decent-sized name people coming up there and talking politics. I said, “Well, sure. I’ll come up, check out your show. Sure. I’d love to see your station, see what you have.”
And Alan Keyes was there. I’m not sure if you remember Dr. Alan Keyes. He was a presidential candidate back in the Bush era. I’ll just talk about him and being vice president for Bush, the first Bush, but you know, things like that. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don’t. Very sharp mind. He was an ambassador for Ronald Reagan in two different countries. And he said, “Hey, why don’t you come up and we’ll [unintelligible 00:06:12] on the show.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, sure.” [unintelligible 00:06:14] that’s a great honor, you know, get this major player like that.
And I said, “Okay, sure. I’ll sit in on the show.” So… the—it was almost sort of funny because the host of the show is this just a good guy. But it was three people: it was me, Alan Keyes and the host of the show. Well, the host this show comes in here and says, “Well, this is Stacey Campfield, local politician, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Did this—their thing, “And Dr. Alan Keyes. Guys, how you doing?” I said, “Good.”
And he’s like, “What do you think about Donald Trump?” And I just started talking. And I promise you, he gets up and just walks off the stage. So, it’s just me and Alan Keyes. And I’m just [unintelligible 00:06:54]. And I’m like, “Uh, aren’t you supposed—the host supposed to be here for this?” And I’m literally talking to him for, like… I mean, literally like an hour.
And I’m like, “Okay.” I was thinking it was going to be, like, a two-minute little chit-chat thing. And it’s an hour and I was like, “Well, you know, I got to get going, guys. Uh, I guess we’re closing out the show.” Literally, they like, threw me to the wolves. And we closed out the show talking with Alan.
And I got off, I was like, “What the heck was that?” And they’re like, “We wanted to see how you handled pressure, if you could just talk spontaneously on the spot.” I said, “Well, I guess I had to. I had no other choice besides sit there looking dumb.” And he said, “Well, you did good. You passed the test, so how’d you like to have your own show?”
And I was like, “Really?” And they’re like, “Yeah,” well, you know, we did my own show a little bit, and I’d co-host with Alan Keyes a lot. For years, we did that back and forth. We had a good debate going on where we’d debate different issues. And they said, you know, I’m not saying—I’m not, like I say, I’m super funny guy, but they’re like, “You’re very spontaneous and comedy relief, where Alan is very strict and standard and solid.” He said, “How’d you like to do a show with something lighter?”
And I said, “You know, that’s pretty much what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to show because I always believe the lighter, softer, fun side of politics is still out there.” So, many people say, “Oh, you can’t talk about politics.” Oh, yes, you can. It’s a fun—I love the topic. It can be fun. It can be funny. And it—mean, shoot, just look at the stuff that’s going on now. It’s sometimes you want to cry, but you know, there’s a lot of funny stuff in there, too.
So, we started with The Reality Camp and it’s just been fun. We’re literally bringing up, talking about news stories, more or less making fun of some of the politicians of the day, whatever the story is going on right now. Right now with Paul Pelosi, we did a whole thing on Hammer time and we had MC Hammer out there busting a move and we just talked about fun stuff. That was—it really just, one thing sort of bled over into the other. So, I’m lucky with my job and my profession. I have plenty of free time I can do stuff like this and have fun. And Knoxville is really been a blessing to me.
Julia: Well, some better I know many people don’t know about you that I know because I’m your real estate agent is that you are a, what I would personally consider a real estate mogul. And people use that word for only people who have high rises. You have hundreds of properties. How did you accumulate and how do you manage that in such a small town like Knoxville without a con—like, you just have such a good base and an eye for growing businesses. Can you give some people some advice on that and kind of how you do that?
Stacey: Yeah. I mean it really [laugh]—the best advice I ever got was from my cousin who said, “Stacey, if you want to make it in real estate, all you need is a strong back and a weak mind.” Well, I qualified. So, I guess you here I am. And you know, and the more I look back and I said you know he’s probably pretty right because you have to be able—when you’re young, you have to be able to work a little bit and get your hands dirty a little bit and do the things needed to learn how to do this trade.
And then you have to have a weak mind in that when something doesn’t go right, when something’s going wrong, when you’re completely burned out, you have to be able to just say, “Psht, okay, I’m not going to think about that anymore. Forget it, I don’t need that anymore. I can… delete that, from my memory banks and just move forward, keep moving forward.” It was really sort of funny, I came down, I bought a ten-plex, with my cousin and that didn’t work out [laugh] at all. So, I was literally flat broke after that deal happened.
And I bought my first house, I promise you, it was $700. I bought my first house for $700. It was condemned, it was in terrible shape. It lived right across the street from my cousin who gave me that advice. And I just literally had to track the person down who owned it, which took time. I mean, it literally took me months and months of I mean, sometimes you can go to the courthouse to get the records and find the person and then call them up say, “Hey, do you want to sell this house?”
And there’s a million people doing it right now. I pretty much did that process, but literally, I had to talk to a cousin who talked to, you know, the uncle talked to the brother-in-law who finally said, “Hey, I own it. I’ve been wanting to sell it, but my uncle…” whatever, the one guy who didn’t want anybody else to get it except his buddy, so he kept stringing me along for months and months and months. And then he finally just gave up on his buddy and I finally got through. I literally bought the house for 700 bucks because it was in rough shape.
First house, like, into—like, anybody, when you’re starting a new trade, you really don’t know very much. I knew a very little bit. I had been an electrician’s helper for a couple of months, which more or less taught me enough how to wire a house roughly. It’s not rocket science. I always tell people everything you see done in—so many people are so intimidated; is not as hard as you think.
I mean, obviously, electrical, you don’t want to stick screwdrivers and outlets and stuff like that, but I imagine if you took somebody who has a little bit of training, within a day or two, you can know the fundamentals of how to do just about everything on a house. I did my first house, I got it done. I said, “That was terrible. I hated it. I’m never going to do it again. Never, never, never, never, never.”
And then I moved into it. And I was poor at the time. And I said, well, wait a second. I had—it was a three-bedroom house. I was renting out the other two bedrooms. And I said, you know, wait a second. These other two guys are paying what it cost me to fix up this house and I’m living for free. So, this is awesome.
So, about six months later, somebody came to me said, “Hey, I got another house for sale if you want one.” I said, “Sure. Why not? I guess. Maybe… yeah, maybe. Okay, I’ll take it.” Because it was such a good deal. I bought it, fixed it up. I rented it out. And I said well, wait a second. This is paying all my living expenses from—I pay off the mortgage and I have enough left over to more or less put money in my pocket, and it pays for my electrical, it was paying for my food, my housing, everything, was now at this point, I’m living pretty much free. So, I said, “Huh.”
So, I got a third house, the third house came to me and I got the third house. And I started doing it. I said, okay, this is a system. It’s not just me working, I got more people working and one guy helping me, and we finished it a little quicker. Got the third house done. I said, now I’m just making pure profit.
And I started thinking myself, well, how many of these do you want? Because at this point on, you realize it’s a system. You put a little bit of money in. Once you get that first one done, it pays for itself. And you get 10, 20, 30, 40, however many you like. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing is just growing one after the other.
Now, if people will get into real estate, there’s a couple of things, and I guess this is part of your show, we can talk about some of the problems with being in real estate, versus watching real estate on TV. And I’m sure you’ve seen this a million times. Some people will say, “Oh, I want to be in real estate,” or, “I want to be a salesman,” or, “I want to sell real estate,” or, “I want to do rental properties,” or whatever. It’s all well—you know, it looks great on a TV show—or, “I want to flip houses.” That was the hot one a couple of years ago, “I want to just flip houses and make hundreds of thousands of dollars every house I flip. I watch these guys on TV and they’re done in 30 minutes. You know the house is done and maybe it takes them a week or two, but it’s finished and they made a hundred thou—200,000, $300,000.”
It’s not like that. It’s not like that. I always tell people, everything you think is going to happen is going to cost you twice as much and take you twice as long, if you’re lucky. If not longer than that. Especially on your first one or two. I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve realized, it’s not… it’s not always smooth, you’re always going to hit bumps in the road, there’s always going to be something you have to take care of you didn’t think of.
Which they show those in those shows, but what you don’t see in those TV shows is when the husband and wife are done breaking the little hole on the wall that they finally, you know, their first little effort on the house. After that, you know, after their ten-minute cameo TV time, they have a crew of 50 guys that come in and really just slam out the house and get it done. But I tell people, anybody can do it. You just got to be patient with yourself. My first house took me a year to do it because it was pretty much just me doing it.
But that was so key because I learned how to do every trade, a little bit at least enough to realize, okay, I can do electrical; this is what needs to get done to get this up and running. This is what I need for plumbing. This is how you do sheetrock. This is how you hang sheetrock. This is what you need to do for framing. You learn all those things in your first house, or maybe two houses, maybe three houses.
You learn all those things and then it’s so key because when you go to contractors and a contractor comes in, says oh, I want to do the electrical or I want to do the plumbing or I want to do this, and they say hey, your bid is $8000, $10,000, you can say, “Well, wait a second. I could do that work with me and another guy and have it done in three days and it’s, you know, maybe 500 or 1000 bucks.” So, you can start making value judgments based on how you want to do these things and how you want to make money. And that’s pretty much what you learn your first couple houses. So, keep that in mind.
Now, I’m getting to a stage in my career. It’s very interesting what I’ve been able to do. Before I was always doing one to the other to the other, just buying one house, fixing it up, renting it out, and as more money came in, I’d buy another house, fix it up, rent it out. A lot of people have done things where they flip the first couple houses. I have a buddy of mine, who I got—I’m not going to say I got him started. He says I got him started but he had the motivation to do it… [unintelligible 00:17:09] huh? Yeah, I should. Yes, I made him everything he is. He’s a multimillionaire now and has hundreds of houses and it’s all because I helped him with his first house a little bit.
I’d like to take the credit, but I really can’t. But he sold his first couple of houses where I just hung on to mine. He’s up in Middle Tennessee area. He flipped a few which made him very liquid, which made it easy for him to get past the onesie-twosies, one at a time stage. What I’m finding now, and it’s really turned into the hot ticket for, really, everybody, I’m seeing people are now doing seminars on it, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for about 15 or 20 years, it’s really now just coming into vogue.
After the crash, 2008 real estate crash, so many people, so many big banks took a beating, they would not lend on investment property. And I had all these houses I said, you know, I own all these houses, they’re all free and clear. They’re all bringing in positive income. My credit score is good. Let’s move forward.
What I want to do is start borrowing and buying multiple, multiple, multiple houses. All the big banks were so gun-shy after the crash, none of the big banks would do it. I finally went to a small bank and had a lot of success. Small bank said, “We’re here for you. What do you want to do?” And I said—and it’s become incredibly popular. I mean literally people are—what you’re going to hear on this show right now is what people are charging thousands of dollars to get private seminars for are charging hundreds of dollars just to do a mass seminar.
What people are doing now is they’re buying a property, let’s just say… let’s just say you can buy a house—I’m just going to throw some ballpark numbers—80,000 dollars you can buy a beat up house, okay? And then maybe it’s going to cost you another $20,000 to fix it up. These are just ballpark numbers. This is not anything. But okay, you have $100,000 invested in a property.
What you do is you go to the bank and say hey, “I need the $100,000. I’ve got this house; I fixed it up”—usually your first one’s hardest you get it done—you borrow the money. There’s a lot of deals for first-time homebuyers. You get the loan for that house.
Now, you have $100,000 invested in it but what you have now is not a $100,000 house. You have a $150,000 house because you have—your initial investment was 80, you put in 20. That’s not the value of your house any longer. The value of your house now has gone from $100,000 or $80,000, it’s almost doubled in value, say maybe $150,000. You have $50,000 of pure profit. $50,000 of equity in that house. You go back to the bank. The bank will say, “Hey, if you’d like another 100 grand, you have to put $20,000 down.” You’ve got $50,000. So, how many houses at 20,000 apiece can you get with 50,000? You can get at least one, maybe two—that’s a little Spock thing going on there—and have ten grand left over.
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Julia: Right. Makes total sense. Is this kind of how you’ve done this process the whole time?
Stacey: It’s really—well, like I said, when I first got started, I was onesie twosie-ing, just one after the other after the other. Now, it’s growing very quickly. I mean, I’ve got, like, six houses I’m working on right now. I’ve got other properties, I’ve got two or three other [bear 00:21:14] properties just waiting to go. So, it’s going very quickly right now and growing very quickly right now.
But literally, I mean, you can do this. It’s not rocket science. You just have to be patient. And I tell people all the time, I have friends who live in other states, I have people who live in Knoxville. And I say hey, if you want to come and sit down and do lunch sometime, you buy me a hamburger or take me out to eat somewhere, I’ll sit down and we’ll just do the whole plan for you.
And I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had some people who’ve taken me up on it and some have become very successful. Some people just like to hear it and maybe they’ll get four or five, six rental properties and they’re making good money. They’re happy. God bless you, you know? I’m happy to add some stability to somebody’s life. But the return on investment on real estate and property is so astronomical, at least in Knoxville. And every market is different. I make no guarantees.
Julia: That’s a good point. Do you feel like Knoxville is still an opportunity zone, like, for investors? Has it reached his peak? Are we still growing? Do we still have opportunity?
Stacey: Well, Knoxville is still growing and it has been a very hot town. I mean, we’re not like Nashville, which is ridiculous. I mean, the numbers there are just jumping by huge leaps and bounds. I mean, the numbers are doubling every couple of months. It seems like here, it’s still somewhat reasonable.
You can still buy inexpensive houses and fix them up. I’m not really big on the big expensive places. I don’t think there’s as—you can make margins on that for rental and stuff like that. I think smaller two-bedroom, three-bedroom houses, more family-style houses, you can make good money on. There’s plenty of room sti—there’s always room to make money. Listen… [sigh] I still, I look at all these other places and they’re all trying to catch up to what Tennessee is doing.
Julia: I agree with that one hundred percent. One hundred percent. So, goal for the next five years. We know Knoxville is going to continue to grow, we know that there’s opportunity here, we know that more people are coming here for opportunity. Where do you see Knoxville in five years?
Stacey: Growing really quickly. Right now, our downtown has already exploded. It became a hippie, tren—hipster trendy area, which I—you used to be able to shoot a gun down the main street of downtown at eight o’clock at night and you wouldn’t hit anybody. You could stand on one end and shoot a shotgun and not hit a thing. You used to be able to buy a whole floors of major buildings for $10,000.
Obviously, those days are gone. I mean, now it’s you know, $200 a square foot type thing for the downtown trendy spaces, but you can still get many, many houses on the outskirts of town. I think a lot of that smaller two-bedroom, three-bedroom houses are still growing, people are still coming into Tennessee, which is great for people in rental. There’s not enough houses. If you have one, your rentals are going—I mean mine, I hate to say it, almost, some of them have probably doubled in the last three, four years.
I don’t up them on people when they’re in there, but if they move out, I go up to whatever the current value is. Some of them have doubled in value in the last four or five years, I’d say. That market is still available. There’s always still [ability there 00:24:19].
Julia: I want to say something right there because I think that this is something that people don’t know about you that I’m going to share. And I hope you don’t mind me sharing this because I find it really important. I don’t raise my rents on my people vary—like, maybe $50 a year until they move out and then I also go to market, right? And that creates loyalty and they bring the other renters and it creates a situation where people know that you are a trustworthy person. And I bring renters to you all the time and you’ve gone above and beyond for some student athletes that no one else would help.
You don’t ask for accolades. You don’t ask for pats on the back. You always do the right thing. And I think that is an attractive thing for Knoxvillians to know that when you connect with the right people in this town—that’s the name of this podcast: Connect the Knox—that you’re going to get taken care of and you can do a handshake deal and there are people here that will still honor that system. So, I want to just point that out and say thank you because I’ve always appreciated that about you, and I think that’s really great thing.
Stacey: Well, you’re very kind. And I’ve been very blessed, so I do not mind sharing that blessings to others. You know, I don’t have to do another house for the rest of my life. I’m very well taken care of. I could take care of myself for the rest of my life with no problems doing anything. I do this to help people because I enjoy it.
I, literally the first time ever, all the taxes went up in the city of Knoxville about 50% or 100%, and for the first time ever, I had to tell people hey, guys, I hate doing this. Some of you have been with me for five years, saying, “I hate to do this, but my rents are going to have to go up.” And I didn’t go very much. I went up maybe 100 bucks a month at most. And literally I thought, “Man, everybody’s going to be mad, everybody’s going to leave, everybody’s just going to hate me because I’m upping rents at the end of their lease.”
And every single person to a one, said, “We understand. That’s very kind of you to only up it that much. So, many other people are jumping at a whole bunch more. We appreciate you.” And it was just, made me feel good that people could see hey, the other side of it is I’m not doing this—you know, I could have really jacked it on them, you know and said, “Hey, you know the markets gone up 25%, so you know, your rents going up 25%.” And to me, it was like a 5% raise or increase in rents. And everybody was really good about that. I was really pleased at how everybody took it and—
Julia: Well, you have the southern mentality, and when you treat people right, people treat you right, and I think that that’s something that is very… it’s such a good thing. So, we only have three minutes left.
Stacey: Three. Go.
Julia: So, here’s what we’re going to do. Three.
Stacey: Three [crosstalk 00:26:43].
Julia: So, we got favorite restaurant in Knoxville?
Stacey: Favorite restaurant is probably—well what kind of food?
Julia: Any food. What’s your favorite thing?
Stacey: You know what Knoxville needs? What—Knoxville needs a good Italian restaurant? We don’t have a good—we got great barbecue. Awesome barbecue. We got okay pizza.
Julia: I didn’t ask you what Knoxville needed. I said what is your favorite restaurant?
Stacey: I’m telling you, if there’s anybody out there from an Italian restaurant family, you need to come to Knoxville. You will be rich. You will make an everloving fortune if you make good Italian food. There’s [unintelligible 00:27:18] that’s what we need. All right.
Best—there’s a couple pizza places I like a lot. You know I have a garbage gut stomach, so I’ll eat just about anywhere and anytime… gosh, favorite restaurant. Umm… I’m trying to think the last place I went. There’s so many good places in Knoxville. There really are.
There’s a lot of trendy new restaurants and you can go on and on and on about them. Oh, there’s a pizza place off of Broadway and I cannot remember the name of it right now. It’s escaping my mind, but I really liked their veggie supreme pizza. There’s a place called La Herradura which is Mexican food. I love them. They literally grew from a taco truck to two taco trucks to five taco trucks.
Now, they have, like, two different restaurants and five taco trucks. And they’re just doing—
Julia: Where is this?
Stacey: There’s one—the one—there’s one near my house, which is great for them because I hit that place up probably three times a week. La Herradura is a yellow taco truck on Broadway. There’s one there. There’s—or on Merchants. There’s a store, or one of their hard locations is on Broadway. There’s one on Kingston Pike, one of their taco trucks. There’s one in South Knoxville. They’re all over the place. But they’re really good. They took over an old Chick-fil-A up near West Town Mall. They’re really good Mexican food. Awesome Mexican food.
Julia: Okay, I’m going to check out the La Herradura near West Town Mall. That’s the one closest to me, so I’ve never been. And you’re the first person I’ve interviewed that has a restaurant I’ve never been to. So, now I’m excited to try it out. One minute or less. How can people find your website, find you, and be able to connect with you outside of this space?
Stacey: Sure. brighteon.com. It’s spelled like brighteon dot com. You go there. And you go to Stacey Campfield, I’m on Facebook. One of mine just got shut down; a curse on you Mark Zuckerberg. But I’m on Facebook if you want to contact me. If you want to set up a lunch we can set up lunch and I’ll try and show you whatever I can, help you out any way I can. Let’s see, therealitycamp.com. Therealitycamp.com that’s my TV show. And thank you so much for having me on, Julia.
Julia: I love you, Stacey. I think you’re one of my favorite people in Knoxville. If anybody needs to connect with Stacey Campfield, he’s one of my best friends. I’ve got it. If you need some rental information, you need a house, I’ve got a connection for you.
Make sure that you visit Connect the Knox. Thanks for visiting, everybody. Bye.
Thank you for tuning into the show. Make sure to like and subscribe, leave a five-star review on your podcast player of choice, and if you would like information on moving to Knoxville, send me a private message. As always, this is Julia Hurley, connecting Knoxville to the nation.
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