The real estate market – in case you haven’t heard – hasn’t been doing too well the past few years. Sure, there have been recent signs of improvement, but not enough to bring it back to the glory days of the early 2000s when some Realtors had more leads than they could handle.

As a result, many home sellers have gone on to find success in other areas, adapting in order to survive.

In 2006, John Martin was at the top of his real estate game. The Hendersonville native had more leads than he could handle and had even brought some agents in to handle the surplus of work, a far cry from his first year in the business when he only sold two homes, including the one he bought for himself.

“I had always studied marketing and branding, and it was a passion of mine, but it was struggling that first year that made me realize it is not just about how well you know the market or how good you are with people,” Martin says. “You have to know how to actually get business.

“So I shifted all my focus and quickly started selling a lot of houses, getting repeat business to where I couldn’t handle it. The more and more I did that, the more and more I realized I loved the marketing part of it. Not so much going out on a Friday night and driving people all over town to look at houses.”

He wasn’t happy.

“The more the real estate business got successful, the more miserable I became,” he says. “Real estate was getting tougher. The deals that used to close now weren’t closing and the phone wasn’t ringing like it used to. I kind of started to see the writing on the wall.”

So with impeccable timing, he unofficially quit the real estate business in 2007. He kept his license for a few more years in case he needed it, but decided to pursue his true passion in branding and marketing.

Now, Martin consults with Fortune 500 companies and his book, Brand Against the Machine, was published in November with nearly 40 five-star reviews on Amazon. He works out of his home and is able to spend time with his two children, one 3 years old and the other 7 months. He also doesn’t get stood up for early Saturday drives with potential buyers anymore.

“I am totally doing what I love now and having far more success with that,” he says. “But it has been an interesting path because if you had asked me in the middle of my real estate career what I would be doing today, my goal was to be the No. 1 agent in the state. I never thought this is the path I would be on.”

But without real estate as his background, Martin isn’t sure he would be as successful as he is now.

“I have been in the trenches, and all my clients respect me because they know I know what they are going through,” he says. “Had I not done that, there is no way I would be where I am today.”

Matt Read moved to Nashville in 2005 and immediately began working for Village Real Estate. He had a background in finance but also a creative side having studied music photography. He took his own real estate photos and was doing it for other agents, as well.

“I started getting more and more busy as a photographer,” he says, “but I was able to still do both, because they were complementary of one another.”

But eventually the leads started dwindling, and then the bottom fell out of the condo market.

“As the condo market started to fall off, the first-time homebuyer market picked up and we got really, really busy for not nearly as much money,” Read says. “And then when we saw that fall off, we started getting back into higher-priced homes, but fewer.”

The photography was going well and he became friends with a video guy and a graphics guy and a web guy and saw that maybe they could all work together.

“We just joined our services to see what happened, and within six months we shifted gears completely,” he says. “We decided not to focus so much on our individual talents as artists, but rather focus on our talents as seeing the potential of businesses and brands and marketing.”

In April 2011 they launched The Funky Umbrella, a boutique creative agency with an office in Berry Hill. They handle everything from logo design to branding, creating promo videos, website design, copy editing and more.

“We’ve been able to branch out our network so well that we can have a team of seven people working on a full campaign, whether they work for us or are strategic partnerships,” he says. “We provide the full service.”

Read still has his hand in real estate, however, and is looking at ways to rebrand that.

“It was one of those things to see who could survive this market,” he says. “When I came in there were a lot of people who probably had no business selling real estate, and we have gone through a weeding out period, and I don’t see a boom that is going to bring that many more people to it.”

Shannon Pollard has always had a diverse portfolio. The grandson of music legend Eddy Arnold, he handles the legacy portion of his estate and launched Plowboy Records in 2009 to manage those interests. He just finished up a stint as an adjunct professor at Belmont, teaching history of the recording industry. He also is the co-owner of Maintenance on Demand, a concierge maintenance and repair service through which customers can buy a monthly block of time to get help around the home or office.

His main gig is real estate, though, and in 2010 he partnered with Steve Armistead for Armistead Arnold Pollard Real Estate Services, a full-service commercial firm that specializes in brokerage and residential development. Armistead was the co-founder of Armistead Barkley, Inc., the developers of the BMG/Sony building, The Gulch, 1101 McGavock Street facility, and the Bohan Building, and was most recently the senior vice president of Crosland Tennessee. Pollard also serves as president of Arnold Realty, an investment firm created by his grandfather in 1955.

But just a few months ago the pair did something a little unusual. They bought the Tennessee Valley Pecan Company in Decatur, Ala. In operation since 1942, Armistead knew the family who made the treats and was the person the previous owners, the Hawthornes, reached out to when they were looking to sell the seasonal business. Pollard and Armistead bought it last September, moved it to a new location with a retail storefront and have increased operations to year-round.

“They are in their 80s and they didn’t want to do the business anymore, and their kids had no interest in it,” Pollard says. “It was an interesting opportunity and a profitable venture, so we are just trying to turn it into something bigger.”

Now, Armistead’s brother David is overseeing the day-to-day for the pecan company in Alabama while the two focus on their flagship project here, the development of 66 acres on Granny White Pike that belonged to Eddy Arnold. They are currently in the design phase and will be submitting soon to the planning commission.

“The pecan company was a very intriguing concept,” Pollard says. “Steve and I are open-minded entrepreneurial people and our business diversity is born out of that.”

Sounds like a plan for success.