David Knapp is an Associate Broker with Stillwaters Realty Group at Keller Williams Auburn-Opelika, and if you ask him why he got into real estate, the answer doesn’t start with a business plan. It starts with a herniated disc.
What Made David Knapp Become a Realtor?
The short answer is a health crisis forced a pause, and the pause turned into clarity. David wasn’t planning a career change in 2020. He was planning to keep doing what he was doing — helping run a business in Opelika, working hard, moving forward. Real estate wasn’t on the calendar. Then his body made a different decision for him.
What Happened in 2020 That Changed Everything?
David tested positive for COVID in 2020, but that wasn’t what put him out of commission for two months. Underneath it, undiagnosed for a while, was a herniated disc causing sciatica bad enough that it took a rotation of chiropractors and physicians before anyone landed on the real answer: he needed full surgery.
Two months out of work. Two months in pain. Two months with nothing to do but think.
“It was a wake-up moment,” is how David describes it — and it came paired with something he’d already been chewing on: the idea of building something repeatable, something that scales, something with consistency behind it, instead of just staying in motion without a system. During those two months, that idea and a clear sense that it was time got real estate license and a real estate investing focus on the calendar for good.
There wasn’t a slow ramp-up. David spent the next year working both his existing Opelika business and his new real estate career at the same time — building the license into a full practice while still carrying the other work. That kind of overlap is rarely glamorous. It’s early mornings, late closings, and a lot of double duty. It’s also, as it turned out, the run-up to David being named Rookie of the Year in Lee County in his first year in the business — recognition that came out of a stretch most people would have called overextended, not award-winning.
What’s the Difference Between a Business and a Practice?
This distinction matters to how David runs Stillwaters Realty Group today, and it traces straight back to that 2020 stretch. A practice is you, personally, doing the work — valuable, but capped by your own hours and your own bandwidth. A business is a system: repeatable processes, a team that can execute at a high level, consistency that doesn’t depend entirely on one person having a good week.
That’s the model David built toward from year one, and it’s why Stillwaters Realty Group today runs with producing agents and admin support rather than David as a solo operator holding every piece together himself. The Rookie of the Year year wasn’t the finish line — it was the proof of concept for building it that way from the start.
What Does David Knapp Love Most About Real Estate?
Ask David what he loves about the job and he doesn’t talk about listings or commissions. He talks about the closing table.
“I love sitting around a closing table knowing that a lot of hard work — and really, quality relationship, and then follow-through — has come to a moment in time that these individuals will probably remember the rest of their life, or at least it’ll impact their life in some large way.”
That’s not a line David reaches for because it sounds good in a bio. It’s what shows up when he’s asked a straightforward question about his favorite part of the job, unscripted.
What Actually Happens at a Closing Table?
Legally, a closing is a transfer of ownership — signatures, a title change, funds moving. But David is careful to separate what a closing represents on paper from what it represents for the people sitting there.
There are real ups and downs before most closings happen. Some deals move clean. Others go through rocky patches — financing hiccups, inspection surprises, negotiations that stall before they move again. David’s take is that his job through those stretches is to hold the process together professionally enough that, whatever the deal looked like along the way, everyone at the table walks away glad they went through it with him.
On the sale side, that table often carries a visible sigh of relief — a seller closing the door on one chapter so the next one can start. On the buy side, it’s a different energy entirely: the rush of getting keys to a place that’s now actually, legally, yours. David gets to sit in the middle of both of those moments, on a regular basis, and two-and-a-half years removed from a surgery that sidelined him for months, he doesn’t take that seat for granted.
Why This Matters If You’re Buying or Selling in Auburn or Opelika
None of this is a pitch about closing volume or transaction counts — those numbers matter, but they’re not the reason David tells this story. The reason is that the version of David Knapp sitting across the table from you in Auburn, Opelika, or anywhere across Lee County built his business on a specific premise: that real estate, done right, isn’t a transaction you survive — it’s a relationship you build toward a moment that actually matters to the people living it.
If you’re weighing whether now’s the right time to buy or sell, or you’re trying to figure out what separates one agent from another in this market, David’s answer usually starts the same way most of his answers do: “Here’s what I would look at.” Track record. Systems. Whether the person across from you treats the process like a practice or like a business built to carry you all the way through.
If you want to talk through where you are — buying, selling, or just thinking about it — reach out to David Knapp at Stillwaters Realty Group, Keller Williams Auburn-Opelika, at 334-750-1700 or davidknapp@kw.com. 1747 Ogletree Rd Suite C, Auburn, AL 36830.
Have a blessed one.