Editorial
Front Page - Friday, May 21, 2010
New agent finds success in real estate late in life
David Laprad
Crye-Leike Realtor Bill Britt got into real estate in his ‘60s and
- David Laprad
Crye-Leike Realtor Bill Britt is sitting at his desk ready for whatever the day has for him. He looks sharp, dressed as he is in a white shirt and the blinding aura of the morning sun, which is bursting through the window behind him. While his silvery hair suggests he has several decades of sunrises under his belt, his energy and humor are at a higher level than most people can handle early in the day.
Born and raised in Alabama, he notes the lack of red in his office on Battlefield Parkway and says, “I tell people I have crimson blood with a bit of an orange tint.”
Britt smiles as he says this. He’s in a good mood. Although his clients and colleagues would say this is the Bill they see every day, Britt has a good reason to be cheerful: he became a grandfather for the fifth time a few hours earlier.
“I was up most of the night,” he says. “He’s my only son’s first child, so he’s my first grandchild with the Britt name. When I went to the nursery to see him, the nurse told me he’s got quite a temper.”
Britt might have had to wait longer than some grandparents to see the birth of a child that would carry his name forward, but he knows life never reaches a point where good things can stop happening.
He learned that four years ago when he decided to go into real estate.
Before becoming a Realtor, Britt spent over 40 years working in industry. His father moved to Michigan in the ‘50s, and Britt tagged along, went to work, got married and raised a family. In the late ‘80s, Britt moved to North Carolina, where he took a job with Purolator, a manufacturer of filtration products for automobiles. Several years later, he transferred to a plant in Missouri; when it closed, he moved to Sevierville, Tenn. After his wife died from cancer in the late ‘90s, Britt moved to the Chattanooga area to be near their four children.
He immediately fell in love with the city.
“It’s great. It’s big enough to offer hospitals, museums and schools, and yet small enough you can still get around,” he says. “Plus, you’re just an hour and a half away from Atlanta, Nashville and Knoxville, and two hours away from Birmingham and the Smoky Mountains. I love it.”
When Britt arrived in Chattanooga, he went to work for AMG International, an evangelical mission and relief agency. When the company had to tighten its belt seven years later, it let Britt go.
Although he was in his 60s, Britt wasn’t ready to settle into a rocking chair, so he started looking for something to do. A friend suggested real estate.
“I told him I’m not a salesman,” he says. “But he urged me to look into it, so I came here and talked with Frank McDaniel, the broker at the time. I told him I’d never sold anything in my life; he told me real estate isn’t sales, it’s relationships. That was the key.”
Britt couldn’t have picked a worse time to start selling houses, as the market started sliding the moment he was in. But that didn’t keep him from becoming the top-selling agent in his office in 2009.
He doesn’t know how to account for his success, though. “I don’t know why I’ve sold the houses I’ve sold,” he says. “It’s a mystery to me.”
Perhaps Britt sets his clients at ease. He says he loves helping his customers to achieve their goals and makes a point of forming relationships with them, as McDaniels suggested.
“When someone comes to me, the first thing I do is get to know him,” he says. “I ask him what he likes doing, find out what he wants in a home and then share some of my experiences with him. I try to build a friendship.”
This approach has earned Britt his share of referrals. However, as pleased as he is with his accomplishments in real estate, he says money isn’t what gets him out of bed every morning, but a compulsion to be active.
“I have to get up and get out. I could work at home on my computer, but mentally, I need to get dressed, come into the office and talk with people,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with going home at noon and doing nothing for the rest of the day, but if I don’t get up and get out in the morning, even if it’s just to check my email and line up my day, I get depressed.”
Britt knows old habits die hard. For more than four decades, he had to be somewhere at a certain time and hold himself accountable to specific people, so it stands to reason that he functions best within a routine.
But Britt is also relishing the newfound freedom that comes with running his own business. “I work a lot of unusual hours, but I have a lot of free time, too,” he says. “I don’t have to ask my boss for the afternoon off; I can do whatever I want to do. It’s different from what I’ve always done, but I’m having a good time.”
Work isn’t the only thing Britt is enjoying these days. In addition to selling houses, he loves riding his Yamaha Midnight Venture, especially along the scenic back roads between his home in Fort Oglethorpe and either Alabama or the Smokies. He also finds pleasure in traveling, reading murder mysteries and taking pictures. “I can’t just sit at home,” he says.
On the wall behind Britt are two photographs he took near Sevierville as the sun rose. In one, a tree stands tall against a pastel sky; in the other, a fire orange expanse of clouds embraces the silhouette of a different tree. It’s fitting the shots are of sunrises, because Britt is a long way from being ready to watch the sun go down.
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