John Dewberry, Atlanta's Real Estate Maverick, Wants A Fresh Start

John Dewberry says he’s a changed man. 

The renegade Atlanta real estate magnate, 62, became a father last year. And he has spent the past decade managing his uber-luxury Charleston hotel, The Dewberry, learning how to cater to his customers' every want and need.

In a two-and-a-half-hour interview with Bisnow last month from his office, Dewberry said fatherhood and the hotel have led him to adopt a “servant” mentality. His wife, Jaimie — sitting beside him the whole time with their 14-year-old spaniel-schnauzer mix, Cooper, sniffing around underfoot — said he is less obsessed with work now that he's chasing around a toddler. 

Dewberry admitted he's earned his reputation for being a stubborn businessman willing to buck convention, rankle local officials — even his own tenants — and hold out for years to get his way. Nowhere is that mindset more evident than in Midtown, which has been the fastest-rising neighborhood in Atlanta in recent years and where Dewberry controls more than a dozen acres. 

He's held onto that land for years, inspiring Bloomberg in 2017 to dub him the “Emperor of Empty Lots.” So while his approach to business might have evolved since then, when it comes to his Midtown holdings, nothing has changed.

“I’m the last of the Mohicans,” Dewberry said as he cracked a grin. “I can wait if we want to.”

Dewberry is one of the most whispered-about figures in Atlanta’s real estate scene. He first became a household name as a quarterback who led Georgia Tech to victory over its bitter rival, the University of Georgia, twice in the 1980s. 

Today, Dewberry has amassed a fortune as a real estate mogul and luxury hotelier who courts controversy as easily as he can charm a room.

He commands some of the most high-profile parcels along Peachtree Street in Midtown, including nearly 4 acres at 132 10th St. across from the Federal Reserve and more than 7 acres next to his Peachtree Pointe office complex. Most of that land is owned debt-free, according to property records.

That means Dewberry can wait to start building whenever he likes. He is known to be meticulous, sometimes to a fault, about the projects he undertakes. He said any development he starts must stand the test of time architecturally and make a lasting impact on the Atlanta skyline. 

“Today, it's all for development, you know, and redevelopment, and so it's more transactional than I am,” Dewberry said from the conference table in the fifth-floor conference room of his offices at One Peachtree Pointe in Midtown.

“We want to create a relationship with people,” he added.

He also owns the Campanile building, a 20-story tower that Dewberry started redeveloping at the start of the pandemic but stopped in the middle. The empty husk of a building at 14th and Peachtree has been called “Midtown's biggest eyesore.”

Dewberry dismissed those criticizing his approach, comparing his talents as a developer to the coach who won more national championships than anyone else in college football history.  

“You pay $50 for your ticket. You think Nick Saban really gives a rat what you got to say from the 17th row?” he said. “What I do know absolutely, and please print this — it will have no bearing on the outcome of the game. Saban knows that, and so do I.”

‘I Would Be Too Difficult’ 

Dewberry graduated from Georgia Tech in 1986 and, after a stint playing for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League, returned to Atlanta and began his CRE career under the wings of another celebrated Tech QB-turned CRE tycoon, Kim King. 

By 1989, he had founded Dewberry Capital with $5,000. Relying on his “regional celebrity, charm and self-directed resolve,” Dewberry, then 25 years old, rounded up a $4M loan to develop a shopping center in North Charleston, South Carolina, according to a 2006 magazine profile.

By 1998, he started an acquisition spree in Midtown. He bought an acre site along Beverly Road for $1.2M, according to Fulton County records, and the site that is now his Peachtree Pointe office complex at Peachtree and Spring streets. 

He originally planned to build a grocery-anchored shopping center, but he changed his mind when a broker called him and told him that no office building had been constructed in Midtown in a decade at that point, and vacancy for Class-A space was below 5%. 

Dewberry said he always trusts his gut, so he decided on the spot to change plans.

“I hung up the phone, got up, walked straight to my brother’s office and said, ‘Doug, remember one day I told you one day we’d become high-rise office developers? Brother, it just started,’” Dewberry recalled.

He began construction on the 200K SF One Peachtree Pointe building within a year, but he wasn't done buying. He paid more than $6M for the nearly 4-acre site at 10th and Peachtree at the start of 2002 and bought a hotel from Wyndham at 125 10th St for $21M in 2003. 

He bought a 158K SF parking deck at Eighth and Juniper in 2004 and nearly 7 acres behind the Temple in Midtown for $6.9M in 2005.

In 2007, he completed the 18-story, 300K SF Two Peachtree Pointe, securing Invesco as an anchor tenant and cementing his status as a formidable player in the Atlanta office game. 

The recession hardly slowed him down. In 2011, he purchased 1627 Peachtree St. for $5.6M and then the 1.6-acre parcel at 17th and Peachtree for $6M, according to Fulton County property records.

He's managed to hold onto most of those properties because they're debt-free, although he has been hit with setbacks, losing the former Wyndham, which he branded as the Hotel Midtown, to foreclosure after he defaulted on a $26M loan in 2011. 

And he managed to ruffle a fair number of feathers along the way. 

He bought an unfinished commercial building in Charlottesville, Virginia, at auction for more than $6M in 2012 with a vision of turning it into a luxury hotel. Except he's never been able to restart construction, and locals have called the site in the heart of the historic city “a terrible eyesore.”

He enlisted CBRE to sell the building last year, but didn't get an offer he liked, so he took it off the market.

“They would give me all this crap about building them a hotel up there after I did a guy a favor and bought the skeleton,” Dewberry said. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

An example of the lengths he'll go: Dewberry Engineers, a Virginia-based engineering firm, sued Dewberry for trademark infringement in 2006. The parties settled the suit a year later.

But in 2020, when the former quarterback rebranded his firm as Dewberry Group, Dewberry Engineers sued him again, Reuters reported. The next year, a U.S. District judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding them a $43M verdict against Dewberry.

But the developer appealed, and in February, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the judgment. 

When Peachtree Pointe first opened, Dewberry said he approached office lease negotiations the way he conducted talks with retailers. Many stores have to be in certain locations, giving the owners of prime properties the ability to stand firm on lease terms. Office tenants have more choices. 

“Shoot, when I opened Peachtree Pointe, I didn't have a clue how to run [office]. I didn't totally understand that,” Dewberry said. “And so when the negotiations would go on, I would be too difficult.”

“It only took me about six months, about one deal, for somebody to say, ‘Screw you, Dewberry,’ when I got a little too difficult in the office business,” he added.

Jim Borders, the CEO of Atlanta developer Novare Group, spent three years as a tenant at Peachtree Pointe and got to know Dewberry as a hands-on landlord. 

“John’s smart, John's a fighter,” Borders said. “John has got to figure out in the end how to win. That’s how he’s been since Georgia Tech.”

But in 2019, he suffered a major defeat when Invesco announced it planned to vacate Peachtree Pointe to anchor a new development in Midtown. It’s a hole that left the building largely empty.

A New Leaf

By the time Invesco packed its bags, Dewberry's primary focus was elsewhere.

He purchased the L. Mendel Rivers Federal Building in Charleston, South Carolina, for $15M in 2008 from the General Services Administration. Commissioned by John F. Kennedy, the building had been vacant since 1999, and Dewberry had a vision for a hotel that would be a model for Southern luxury. 

He sunk $75M into restoring, renovating and adapting the building into The Dewberry, a 154-room hotel that opened in 2016. Operating the hotel has been Dewberry’s obsession since then, he said.

“That kind of feels like our first baby together, in a way,” Jaimie Dewberry said. 

It's paid off with accolades, including a Virtuoso for best independent hotel this year and Travel + Leisure’s top 500 best worldwide hotels. And the developer says he is taking lessons he learned back to his commercial properties.

“That’s how we run our business now: Kind of a servant mentality,” he said. “It’s really about running the office buildings and residential buildings the same thing you do at the hotel, which is basically run the concierge service. How can we make your experience better?”

Bennett Gottlieb, a longtime Atlanta office broker who leases Dewberry’s office portfolio, said Dewberry's attitude and approach as a commercial landlord have changed.

“I’m seeing a renewed excitement with office leasing,” said Gottlieb, who is founder and president of Atlanta-based Capital Real Estate Group. “He’s focused on getting stuff leased up, and he’s focused on doing it the right way and providing a white-glove service along the way.”

That starts with the mostly empty Peachtree Pointe. Dewberry already pulled a rabbit out of his hat when he managed to refinance One Peachtree Pointe in 2010 after it fell to a special servicer, and he's done it again.

He took out a $111.1M loan for Peachtree Pointe and an adjacent development site in 2019 from Wiesbaden, Germany-based Aareal Bank. He refinanced the debt in November, paying down $11M of the balance and adding a separate property as collateral, a 1.7-acre parcel a mile north of Peachtree Pointe along Peachtree Street, according to loan documents examined by Bisnow. 

“We have a lot of runway on dollars for retenanting it a lot,” he said. “Aareal Bank has banked me now for 20 years, probably, and so they were happy to work something out.”

He plans to spend the new capital renovating the lobby, building out space for tenants to backfill the vacant former Invesco headquarters, and ramping up the service program to mirror his Charleston creation.

“We want [Peachtree Pointe] to be a place that you can’t wait to go to,” Jaimie Dewberry said.

“It’s inviting. It’s warm. We can get you a cup of coffee. We can help you get tickets.” 

Whither Campanile?

Aside from Dewberry leaving his prime Midtown properties untouched, his ownership and operation of the former Campanile office tower is the subject of CRE chatter and local stakeholder consternation.

Dewberry bought the 446K SF Campanile in 2010 for $36M in a distressed sale after BellSouth vacated the building following its merger with AT&T. The following year, he was at the one-yard line in negotiations with prominent Atlanta law firm Morris Manning & Martin to relocate its offices to the Midtown tower from its headquarters in the Atlanta Financial Center. 

But a squabble over the proposed lease scuttled those plans, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time. Instead, the law firm renewed its commitment to the AFC, leaving Campanile just 33% leased. 

He was able to sign some small deals, but the tower was half empty by 2017, according to the AJC. So he decided to embark on a full-scale redevelopment, stripping off the facade to eventually replace it with a glassy new exterior. He secured a $186M loan from H.I.G. Realty Partners and Square Mile Capital to finance the conversion.

But the project was beset by delays, not the least of which was the 2020 pandemic shutting down construction. H.I.G. and Square Mile sold the nonperforming note in 2021, according to the AJC.

Dewberry said he was “never a day late or a penny short on payment,” and the default was only because he changed contractors. He paid off the loan, resolved an abandoned project complaint, and by the end of that year, he secured a $75M loan with Acore Capital Mortgage at the tower, according to state court records.

The next year, Dewberry revealed a new grand vision for Campanile’s rebirth: Adding six additional floors to the top of the tower and expanding the square footage at the base for both office and retail. He also rechristened the structure The Midtowne. 

But from the outside, the project still looks unfinished and stagnant. Then-Atlanta City Councilman Amir Farokhi likened the state of the tower last year to battle-damaged structures he saw in post-war Bosnia.

Dewberry said last month his crew has been doing construction work on the inside of the building, planting pilings into the earth at the base of the tower in preparation for the podium’s expansion and the new office floors atop the building. His crews plan to start installing steel beams starting in January.

“We'll still be inside the building just for the next two months or three months,” he said. “Nobody sees that either.”

Dewberry said he has negotiated leases with three companies from outside Georgia that would ultimately take up to 135K SF at the tower. He declined to identify the tenants, but said they were relationships cultivated with executives of those companies who stayed at The Dewberry in Charleston over the years.

But there are heavy doubts from market players that the project will ever be completed. One veteran Atlanta CRE broker who declined to be identified said Dewberry likely needs to spend another $240M to finish the redevelopment.

“He’s still got a shell of a building with enormous costs to finish,” the broker said. “No group that I know of anywhere in the world would fund the completion of that building with him as the owner. I don’t know anyone who would fund the completion of that building period, forget about him being the owner.”

But Dewberry finagled himself more time yet again. The $75M loan from Acore backed by Campanile, which was set to mature on Dec. 15, is likely to be extended after the lender reached an agreement with Dewberry to push the maturity date out for two more years, a source familiar with the debt told Bisnow.

“Around The Midtowne, there'll be new funding; substantial, very substantial, but we can't announce it right now,” Dewberry said, noting that he expects to close on the funding between Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

“Acore may or may not be a part of that,” he added.

While The Dewberry might have been John and Jaimie's first baby, they welcomed their first human child together, Pippa, last April.

Nothing — not surviving prostate cancer, nor dealing with the death of his father and one of his best friends, industrial developer Eben Hardie, in 2019 — gave him the new perspective that Pippa has.

“Having [Pippa] at the time I’ve had her probably was the best thing for me,” Dewberry said. “I am older, and I have accomplished a good bit, so I think that [fatherhood] came to me at the right time.“

He has her front of mind when asked about his legacy. He often says the greatest thing he inherited from his father, John Dewberry Jr., was his name. But he intends to leave his daughter a skyline.

He thinks about the late John Portman, who was remembered for his architectural design that will be admired long into the future, like the Atlanta Federal Reserve or the Margaret Mitchell House. 

“I want folks to say we did it right. Did it at a very high level, and we did it right,” Dewberry said. “That the product has stood the test of time.”

When Bisnow asked him if a building like that is going up anytime soon, he quickly shook off the question. 

“Don't know, don't know, don't know, don't care,” Dewberry said. “But it's going to be here for Pippa and her children.”