If former student Bill Curry, now a football commentator for ESPN, were to describe Roger Cumbie’s teaching style, it might go something like this:

“Cumbie steps back, circles to the podium ... he’s got the giant caveman’s club, folks, and is breaking out into the classroom. He’s telling a quick joke on the run, and now, I can’t believe my eyes, he’s clubbing a student who just gave a wrong answer.

Actually, Cumbie is just pretending to club one of the students at the recently opened Cumbie and Trull School of Real Estate upstairs at Asheville’s Innsbruck Mall. It’s Cumbie’s second school in Asheville, his first, the Cumbie Institute of Real Estate, trained hundreds of local Realtors in the ’90s before he took an early and, as it turned out, premature retirement in Arizona.

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen at teaching a complex subject to diverse classes,” says Curry, a former pro football player who went on to coach at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky before joining ESPN. Curry was a student in the mid-’90s when he and his wife wanted to learn more about real estate to help them purchase property in Western North Carolina.

“His attention to detail, his ability to hold an audience, and his use of a rich sense of humor combine to make for a delightful, ‘impactful’ learning experience.”

“I do love the interaction with students,” Cumbie says of a teaching style that’s high energy, humorous and utilizes a number of props accumulated through the years. Some, like a giant pair of binoculars, are used to illustrate a particular point (full disclosure) while some, like the caveman’s club, are just for fun. Other props include a judge’s robe and white powdered wig, a mountaineer’s hat, a hockey stick, and a half-green, half-red sports coat used to illustrate dual agency.

While Cumbie’s teaching style in part springs from his own energy and enthusiasm, there’s also some science behind it as well. “Psychologically, people learn the least from just listening to someone speak,” he says, “ but they learn the most if you incorporate saying and doing.”

While Curry is probably one of the better-known alumni outside Western North Carolina, Cumbie graduates read like a Who’s Who of local Realtors, including Russell Wood, president of the Asheville Board of Realtors, and Kirk Booth, the board’s immediate past president.

Cumbie, a successful Realtor in Florida before moving to Asheville in the late ’80s, began teaching at the long-closed Asheville Academy of Real Estate, striking out on his on in 1994. Over the ensuing years, his business thrived. And while he wasn’t looking to sell, he did just that in 2000, the result of an of an unsolicited offer he says he couldn’t refuse.

Last year, however, Cumbie and his wife, Linda, returned to Asheville to help care for her aging mother. Since August, the Cumbies, including son Jason, who is finishing up his MBA at East Carolina University, have been extensively renovating a 3,400-square-foot space in Innsbruck Mall on Tunnel Road, where once again he’ll entertain and educate.

Joining Cumbie is Asheville attorney and veteran real estate educator Bill Trull.
“Bill’s probably the only other person I know that loves teaching real estate as much as I do,” Cumbie says.

Trull, who received his law degree from Duke University, worked in private practice from 1977 through 2001 with a concentration on real estate matters the last 15 years. He has also taught a variety of legal and real estate classes at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and Blue Ridge Community College.

In 2001, Trull became part-owner of Cumbie Institute of Real Estate and taught as primary instructor after selling his share of the school.

Cumbie and Trull is located in suite 23A on the second floor of Innsbruck Mall, 85 Tunnel Rd. The school can be reached at 828-258-2559 or via the web at cumbieandtrull.com.