Alumni Spotlight: Candus Rucker
By Serena Maria Daniels
When Candus Rucker left Dallas after nearly a decade in real estate, she thought she was simply coming home to restart her career. Instead, she found her purpose.
A Detroit native, Rucker spent nine years in Texas, thriving as a multi–million-dollar real estate producer and investor. But the pandemic, coupled with the loss of both her parents in 2020, forced her to pause and reassess everything. “You start to look at your life and you're like, ‘man, I did all this work, and I lived in Dallas for all these years,” she says. “My parents were in Michigan. I felt like I had missed a lot of years trying to chase success.”
By 2022, Rucker began feeling a pull to return to Detroit — not just to rebuild her business, but to reimagine what meaningful success might look like. “I wanted to do more purposeful work,” she says. “I thought I’d just start over as a real estate agent, but God had other plans.”
“I really began to get a lot of inclinations to come back home to Detroit and kind of pivot my business, and also reimagine what I wanted to do moving forward. I wanted to do more purposeful work,” says Rucker. “I thought I was going to be more like a real estate agent. I'm like, ‘OK, I gotta start my real estate business again, rebrand myself, build here,’ but God had other plans.” That's when the doors in the real estate development space really began to open up, allowing her to quickly become a force for change.
When Rucker first moved back, she wasn’t sure how to plug back into a city that had changed dramatically during her absence. Seeking a way to reconnect, she attended a local real estate conference at MotorCity Casino Hotel. There, she heard a presentation by the team behind Building Community Value.
Soon after, she applied to the BCV program, which she describes as a turning point in her career. “I do have [the] fundamentals together in terms of doing a real estate deal, but doing real estate in a residential space and commercial development is totally different language,” says Rucker. Breaking down that difference in plain speaking and bringing key professionals into the class helped. “It was like laying down the foundation that I needed to get a better grasp on what development was and how I could actively do it myself.”
Those doors led Rucker back to her own childhood neighborhood, where she’s now leading a multi-phase development project that combines affordable housing and community renewal. Her first project — a four-unit residential building — was completed and fully leased in September. “The house I grew up in is right behind my project,” she says. “My grandmother left [the house] to my father, and my father and mother raised me and my siblings in that house, so we still have ownership stakes. It's important that I see that area thrive, not only because I grew up in the area, but because I have a vested interest in our family's property that we have as well.”
Even with her experience as an associate real estate broker and property manager, Rucker says breaking into development as a woman — and particularly as a woman of color — came with its unique challenges. To help overcome such challenges, Rucker also credits Women Empowered to Develop, or We Develop, which supports women in commercial real estate. “It’s a different kind of mentorship when it comes from women who’ve been through it,” she says of the mentorship she’s received through the program. “Being a woman, feeling like I couldn't really assert myself, or having to tiptoe or be extra nice. The ladies, [were] like, ‘no, you don't do all that.’ It's just a different perspective, because they know how it feels, they have that experience and when you're getting rejected in certain spaces, they're like, ‘you know, that's a part of the process, Candus.’”
Now, Rucker is preparing for her next phase of work: scaling up her developments while keeping affordability and community impact at the center. Phase Two of her project, now in the works, will add 27 new affordable housing units on six adjacent lots. Rucker secured critical funding through the Michigan State Housing Development Authority’s (MSHDA) MI Neighborhood Program, which covered half the construction costs of her first building. She also worked with the Opportunity Resource Fund, a community development financial institution Rucker learned about through BCV.
“When you're going into an area that has experienced disinvestment and there's a lot of underserved people in the community, and then you bring a project online in that area, it does something to that community,” she says.
For Rucker, returning home wasn’t just about coming back to Detroit — it was about rediscovering her purpose and her power. “I'm now seeing some fruit of my labor and the teaching that [BCV has] instilled in me, and it's just been amazing to continue to grow on that path.”
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