Lucy Feicht is the owner and broker of Lou Realty Group, a St. Louis-based firm. The brokerage opened in 2014, and five of its 14 employees – including Feicht – are UMSL graduates. (Photo courtesy of Lou Realty Group)

The alarm sounds early – about 5 a.m. – and Lucy Feicht darts out of bed to begin working through her business development reading list.

She’s at the office a few hours later to oversee managerial tasks, communicate with clients and generate new business leads before lunch.

It’s the beginning of a perfect day, she says – one filled with thoughts of real estate from her predawn reading routine to evening discussions with her husband, a real estate developer himself.

“From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, it’s all real estate specific,” the broker and owner of Lou Realty Group says. “I probably talk about real estate more than anything else. It has become a hobby to me in that sense, but it’s also my livelihood.”

Since elementary school, this is the only career Feicht has considered. With deep family roots in real estate, she says the profession is in her blood. So after graduating from the University of Missouri–St. Louis College of Business Administration, it didn’t take Feicht long to act on her childhood dream.

Within three months of receiving her BSBA in marketing, she acquired a real estate license with the end goal of owning her own brokerage. She opened Lou Realty Group two years later, the minimum amount of sales time required for a broker licensure.

“I knew that come the two-year mark, if I felt ready to go out on my own, that I was going to open Lou Realty Group,” Feicht recalls. “That was definitely my plan from the get-go. During my two years as a salesperson, I was developing my name in real estate and drawing out business plans.”

The development of her branding and marketing strategies date further back, though, to her undergraduate studies at UMSL. Here, she worked closely with advisers to manage her course load so that she could finish her degree in less than four years with as many finance and marketing classes as possible.

“Everybody in the business program was so helpful in managing that for me,” Feicht says. “With real estate, marketing and finance go hand in hand. I knew that I wanted to own my own brokerage, so those aspects were important to get the business off the ground.”

When she did open Lou Realty Group, it started as a three-person family business between Feicht, her mother and her sister. Lou Realty is now a group of 14, five of whom are UMSL alumnae.

“The neighborhoods that we sell in, we also live, work and play in,” Feicht says. “It really is important for us to be a homegrown brokerage. As business keeps developing, I think it just attracts individuals who are enthusiastic about St. Louis.”

Thanks to the team’s passion, Lou Realty Group’s sales volume has nearly doubled year after year – a stat which made Feicht a prime candidate for Realtor Magazine’s 2017 30 under 30 class.

Feicht was the lone Missourian in the lineup and the only brokerage owner to make the cut.

She says the award has been a defining point in her career and is an honor that will have a lasting impact through the program’s network of nationally lauded realtors.

Feicht continues to meet with other 30 under 30 alumni, and those connections have motivated her to develop innovative business strategies, streamline practices and focus on new ways to manage her agents.

“I would hope that Lou Realty Group would become a St. Louis brand name,” Feicht says. “When people think of real estate, I want them to think of St. Louis and Lou Realty Group.”