Derrick Hibbler, president of Flip, U.S.A. LLC, is uniquely qualified to comment on tornado recovery in North St. Louis from the perspective of real estate. He grew up hanging out in what is now a disaster zone so he has deep personal connections to the people and places that were impacted. Now he owns a company that invests in improving buildings in these neighborhoods to foster homeownership and to provide decent rental opportunities.
Seven buildings he owns were severely damaged by the tornado, three of them demolished, though none was inhabited.
“I buy, renovate, sell, and lease homes in the North City area, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years now,” Hibbler said. “I kind of have a heart for it.”
He has a bias toward wanting to stabilize the impacted areas and see them rebound – to the benefit of the people who lived in these neighborhoods before the storm hit and who are suffering now. Further, he and his workers have been volunteering to aid in recovery efforts, working side by side with the residents they support. Hibbler has advice that may be hard to hear by people who are living in disaster conditions: stay where you are.
“If you can save your house, do whatever you can to stay there, because there’s going to be an opportunity in the next year or two to take advantage of some new development,” Hibbler said. “That’s gonna come around. Educate yourself on a lot of the programs that are going to come down to assist. I tell people to not jump the gun and don’t think that the help isn’t coming.”
He speaks from 20 years of experience in the real estate business, mostly in the side of the industry that buys to renovate and resell – to flip – the property, hence his company name, Flip, U.S.A.
Hibbler encourages homeowners with insurance not to take the bait when insurers offer early rushed pay-outs, as he said is starting to happen. The first offer, he advised, is seldom the best offer.
“Some people are accepting checks, and they don’t know how to read the jargon, but it’s a huge dollar amount coming at them and they’re just taking it, because it’s a huge dollar amount,” Hibbler said. “But they’re not going to be able to finish their property with it.”
He speaks from his experience of renovating these same structures under circumstances much less traumatic than a tornado.
“You’re not repairing a roof that’s been going bad for like 10 or 15 years. This is something that was ripped off,” Hibbler said. “So, there’s many layers to what’s going on with this – the brick that’s ripped off, there are many layers to what’s going on with the internal before you can even get out to the external.”
He sees the same dynamic with the people impacted just as with their buildings. People must reckon with external damage to their homes as well as internal psychological trauma that is likely to impact their decision making – and not for the better.
“It’s sad, what’s going on, but it’s gonna be a long road to recovery, and it’s gonna be more mental than financial. You’re gonna have people telling you to leave. The money’s gonna tell you to leave. You’re going to have to be mentally strong enough to stay and bear it out,” Hibbler said.
“You’re gonna have to not listen to the talk. You’re gonna have to do whatever it takes to survive. You’re gonna have to rebuild your life with what you have until the help comes. The mentally strong people are gonna win. Everybody else is going to take the easy dollar and get bought out.”
Though Hibbler now operates a small minority business enterprise, he speaks from the perspective of having learned the industry from Clayton-based groups who competed with him and for a time recruited him to work for them.
“They took me under their wing,” he said. “It taught me a lot, and I met a lot of influential people.”
Hibbler’s work helping with the tornado recovery effort is just an intensification of what he already had been trying to do with Flip, U.S.A. There is added emotion as a result of the devastation of places dear to him.
“It’s kind of touching,” he said. “We hung out there as kids. I have friends that stay in the area. It’s a lot of their parents’ homes that we used to hang out in that were destroyed.”
Hibbler pitched in with two full crews, helping with the groundwork, helping people clear their streets and sidewalks. He brought equipment to help people clear garages that had been destroyed and to dump their damaged belongings. He also partnered in one of the many efforts to provide food for people. Asked how a small business owner balances time spent volunteering with making money, Hibbler shrugged off the suggestion of a conflict.
“Right now, I just see the bigger need,” he said. “I’d rather see people in better conditions because I have done a little that I can and I have time to lend. And then a lot of my guys, my contractors, have big hearts as well. So, when I started helping, they started seeing me and started getting out there and doing stuff as well.”
Above all, Hibbler is working to keep people in their homes and neighborhoods.
“I’m gonna keep on working down there to try to keep some people in their houses,” Hibbler said. “A lot of people are going to run to the county areas and get out. But I think that this is not the time to do that. I think this is the time to stay.”