He began his career in the railroad business, surveying first in the western United States the rail bed that became the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.

In 1882, he organized the East Atlanta Land Company, where he designed and developed Inman Park, a residential area connected to the city center by his Atlanta and Edgewood Street Railway Company, which opened along Edgewood Avenue in 1886.

[2] To anchor the downtown end of his streetcar line, he built Atlanta's first skyscraper, the Equitable Building, which in 1893 became the home of the two-year-old Trust Company.

His next land deal was to be Druid Hills, for which he hired the Olmsted Brothers to design a linear park along Ponce de Leon Avenue, but he sold the enterprise to Asa Candler for half a million dollars in 1908.

Wall Street Journal bureau chief Douglas Blackmon's 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name, revealed the extent to which Joel Hurt's fortune was built upon the profitable and exploitative use of harshly-disciplined and cruelly-deprived convict labor.