Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 11, 2009
Exclusive buyers agent brings love of life to real estate
David Laprad
There are few places in the world to which Dixie Billingsley has not traveled. And during her many journeys, she’s gathered enough memories to fill a dozen ordinary lives.
Most of her recollections are contained within the exquisitely framed works of art that line the walls of her Canyon View apartment at Alexian Village. If you try to identify a uniform style that tells you what she’s all about, though, you’ll be unsuccessful.
Billingsley has hung a porcelain painting in one hallway, wood mosaics in the master bedroom and a watercolor in the dining room. Two hand-loomed weavings grace her living room, which is also home to a dragon made of hand cut water buffalo skin. Billingsley is especially proud of several pieces made out of tiny fragments of eggshells. In one, a fisherman casts a net over the waves next to his boat.
“Can you imagine the patience you’d have to have to do that?” she asks.
As Billingsley points at the different paintings in her living room, she calls out the countries where she purchased them, saying the name of each one like she’s remembering how much she loved being there. Parts of Croatia, Germany, Argentina, the Philippines, Japan, China, Thailand, Belgium, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam and more all have a place on her neatly arranged walls.
And there’s a story tied to each one. As Billingsley looks at a painting of a canal in Venice, she says the artist was a drug addict who was reluctant to sell his work. She then points out a painting that shows the area near a post office in England where she and her recently passed second husband stayed.
“We’re always looking for another artist to hang on the wall to remind us of where we’ve been,” she says, adding that she prefers paintings of the places she’s visited to photographs.
Billingsley’s husband died just over a year ago, so she hasn’t made the transition to saying “I” and “me” instead of “we” and “us.” And when she looks at certain paintings, tears well up in her eyes, but she doesn’t try to keep them at bay.
“We had an amazing time,” she says. “Talk about two people who had a wonderful life together.”
Billingsley’s art collection is eclectic, to say the least, but there is one thing that ties all of the pieces together: each one reminds her of how much that place and the people she was with meant to her. In the same manner, her ability to see the value in the city she calls home makes her an ideal ambassador for Chattanooga, a role she occupies as an agent with Buyers Exclusively. Through her work at the company, Billingsley is frequently one of the first points of contact for someone thinking about moving to the area.
For example, a physician who’s scheduled an interview with someone he wants to hire might ask Billingsley to show the man’s wife around town. “We’ll stop in the art district to have a cup of coffee and then I’ll show her a couple houses in their price range so she can see what they could get for their money,” she says.
Billingsley knows you can get a lot of house for your money in Chattanooga, and is always eager to show someone what the city has to offer, but she won’t drag people from one random listing to the next. Rather, she prefers to meet with her clients first and find out what will work best for them.
“We’ll talk about their lifestyle and what they enjoy doing,” she says. “And I’ll ask if they have kids or dogs. Everyone says good schools and being close to work are important, but when a woman who loves to shop finds out she could live close to the mall, she tosses all that other stuff out the window.”
Billingsley laughs as she says this, then gets serious again as she talks about what sets Buyers Exclusively apart from the other companies that utilize buyers agents.
“People want someone who truly represents them,” she says. “There’s a difference between a buyers agent that works for a company that also lists houses and an exclusive buyers agent. If a regular buyers agent sells his own listing, he makes more money. We never have an interest in selling one property over another.”
Billingsley began her career in real estate in the ‘80s when she realized how much she loved helping her friends on Signal Mountain sell their houses. “I’ve met some incredible people doing this,” she says. “My only regret is I didn’t have time to become friends with everyone.”
Time is something Billingsley, now 65, has used well. In addition to traveling all over the place, she spent several years in school, partly to feed her diverse interests, but also because her father said he’d pay for it as long as she earned B’s and could be a teacher when she graduated.
“It was an old-fashioned concept,” says Billingsley, the daughter of an Italian and a Southerner. “My dad grew up in the era in which a woman could be a teacher if her husband died.”
As a result, she attended several schools and obtained a litany of degrees, including an associate degree in interior design, a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and psychology, a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in education.
Billingsley never pursued a career as a teacher, although she did go to work. When she moved to Chattanooga, for instance, she started the first day treatment program for adult acute and chronic psychotics. Helping people find their dream home, though, is what makes her happy today.
“I stayed with real estate because it’s fun,” she says. “You’re always meeting new people and doing new things. Plus, I get to work with the worried well instead of the truly crazy.”
Billingsley laughs again, louder than before, and then walks over to her living room window, which affords her a view as spectacular as any painting in her apartment. Through the glass, she can see Edward’s Point, Prentice Cooper State Forest and part of the canyon through which the Tennessee River winds.
“I’m one of the luckiest persons around,” she says. “I’ve been everywhere, I’ve done everything and I have two phenomenal daughters.”
Billingsley is far from finished, though. Her mother, the Italian half of her gene pool, is 98 and lives in her own apartment nearby, while her maternal grandfather was 105 when he died “a handsome man, with all of his hair and teeth.” Billingsley says she hopes to be around that long, too, as long as she can pull it off as well as her mother.
That should give her plenty of time to collect more artwork, make more memories and help more people find their place in a city that’s almost as eclectic as she is.
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