Wade Adler has spent his entire professional career in the real estate development industry, mainly in the marketing of fine, resort and destination properties. His resume includes executive positions at some of the biggest developments in the Eastern United States. His experience includes exclusive private island properties, high-end executive golf properties and resort communities. He holds real estate brokers licenses in NC, SC, and TN.

Tom has thirty years of teaching and practical experience in tourism and leisure services. As a Tourism Specialist, a few of his programs include the Alabama Agri-Tourism Trail, Alabama-Mississippi Rural Tourism Conference, Alabama Retiree Relocation Conference, and Outdoor Alabama Partnership.

In his current role, Tom provides community and state decision-makers with information and direction on tourism as an economic development strategy. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel, on the board of the Alabama Tourism Partnership, on the board of the North Alabama Agri-Plex, on the Alabama Scenic Byways Advisory Council, and on the Tourism and Marketing Committee of the Governor's Black Belt Action Commission.  In addition, Tom chairs Extension's Rural Economic and Community Development Program Priority Team and serves as Editor of Extension's quarterly ACTION Newsletter.

Jeff Fleming, is the Assistant City Manager for Development in Kingsport, Tennessee, a community of 44,400 located on the Virginia state line in the Appalachian foothills. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from East Tennessee State University in political science and urban planning.

Jeff began his career as a planning intern in 1984 and worked his way through the ranks for the past 25 years. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Senior Executive Institute and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Past honors include selection as one of Kingsport's "Leaders of Tomorrow" (1988), finalist for Kingsport's Outstanding Young Man (1985), and Downtown Kingsport Association's "I Love This Place Award" (2006).

 For the past 4 years, he has managed the social media components for Kingsport, Tennessee.  These components include a community blog that averages 160,000 visits per year and simulcasts on Facebook and Twitter.

Bill Houghton has served as the President of The Landings Company on Savannah's Skidaway Island (4,400-homesite community in coastal Georgia) since early 2010. Houghton joined The Landings after leading New Galena Solutions, a network of marketing thought leaders enlisted to perform "Marketing Stress TestsTM" on clients in the tourism, real estate and golf industries. In 2001, Houghton was hired to develop and lead the Marketing efforts at Reynolds Companies, a Georgia-based corporation whose assets include the Reynolds Plantation, Achasta and Reynolds Blue Ridge communities, a Ritz-Carlton hotel, seven golf courses, a real estate investment fund, plus homebuilding and jet management companies. With initial responsibility for bringing advertising agency functions in-house, over the next 8 years the Department grew under his leadership to support over a dozen additional internal and affiliated clients.

Amongst his professional accomplishments are his having founded the Public Relations Department at one of the nation's largest golf and tourism advertising agencies, and his being named one of the "Top 40 Under 40" in the golf industry by Golfweek magazine. Houghton is originally from the Philadelphia area, where he obtained his MBA (in Marketing Research) at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Diana O'Toole has nineteen (19) years experience in the travel and tourism industry; eight as a professional leisure travel agent and eleven years with the Tourism Division of the Mississippi Development Authority.  She currently serves as Senior Associate Manager with the Tourism Division and is Program Manager for the Hometown MS Retirement Program.

Believing that Hospitality Training and Customer Service are the keys to the success of tourism, retirement or other economic development, Diana was instrumental in the development of an innovative approach to Hospitality/Customer Service Training for the State of Mississippi.

She serves as program speaker for Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, and other civic organizations and as a tourism resource professional with the Mississippi Main Street Association.

A pioneer in the field of active adult community design, Joe Verdoorn has designed over 25 55+ communities that cater to the unique lifestyle needs of this market.  These projects challenged him to realize that a new paradigm was needed to meet the lifestyle expectations of active adults.  To that end, he began researching the 55+ market, the demographics and psychographics, to understand the expectations and motivations of these exacting consumers.  From this, he created an active adult community model that has become an industry standard. This research influenced the design, construction and administration of numerous active adult communities and expanded the knowledge base of the profession.  With the aging of the Boomer generation, Joe continues to research this market and design communities that appeal to the ever changing needs and wants of the senior market.

Dr. Warren developed and has been the lead presenter at TW+A Research's half-day seminar, Marketing Your Community to Retirees, in communities across the country describing how they can use targeted marketing to attract relocating retirees. This seminar was featured on NBC's Nightly News. Also, as part of TW+A Research's efforts to understand the behavior of mature adults,he led the development of a set of proprietary, quantitative mature market research tools called SeniorStat™ that identifies the lifestyles preferred by mature adults most likely to relocate to a particular community and/or development, the dollar value of those relocating retirees to the community, and a ranking of target market areas according to the likelihood of a retiree relocating to the community.