By Melanie Robitaille, Sr. Staff Writer & Graphic Designer
Losing someone is hard, but Timothy Belcher knows the loss of a mother is one that is as unshakable as the love they have for their children. It’s a love he’s blessed to be reminded of often, thanks to his mother, Lilly Belcher’s nearly 20-years of service under the EXIT brand, and the legacy she created through the company’s unique Formula of residuals.
Having worked alongside Lilly, or Waynnie as she was known, Timothy can attest with all familial bias aside how gifted his mother was, and how her larger-than-life heart and personality shone through every transaction and was felt by every client turned friend. Gone for nearly three years now, he says it’s a common occurrence to meet people who recognize their shared last name and associate it with her renowned reputation in the business.
“It hadn’t been two weeks ago that somebody came up to me introducing themself saying my mother sold them their first home,” he recalled, noting it’s just him and his sister now that both their parents have passed. “My dad was a wonderful person too, but nobody comes up to me and talks about my dad like that. She sold one family probably 10 homes. That repeated itself many, many times with several clients. It wasn’t necessarily about her level of knowledge in the business, though she did know the business. It was more about the experience of being with her. That’s what I saw as the reason people remained so loyal to her. She was one of those people who never met a stranger.”
Over her 38-year career, Lilly became known as the go-to for finding success in real estate, both with clients as well as agents. She introduced some 30 real estate pros to the EXIT brand alone, and Timothy watched his mother’s magnetism, likening other agents’ thinking to wanting to learn to be a black belt in karate and wanting a certain sensei.
“For someone to come in under her it was a feeling like ‘I’m being trained by the best.’ If she saw someone who she thought had the talent, and they knew her, it was a done deal,” he explained of her relationship-first approach to everything she did. It’s a skill he learned from her that was a cornerstone of how they ran their office. So much so that when it came time to sell the franchise, Lilly was invited to remain on as an agent and did so for another nine years.
One of Timothy’s best memories was a time when his mother told him she was going to show their friend’s property to a man named Troy Brooks. He recalled the story saying, “When she got to the house, she noticed that our friends were acting strange. It turns out that Troy Brooks was actually Garth Brooks and my mother didn’t realize. Years went by and I was at a place that tints windows for my truck, waiting. Garth Brooks comes in to have a big bus tinted. I was wearing a hat that says Belcher Home Builders and he asked, ‘Are you kin to Waynnie?’”
Together Lilly, Timothy and his wife opened one of the first EXIT franchises in Tennessee, and Lilly was first to pioneer promotion on the grocery carts in the local Kroger stores. Timothy saw how Lilly used her residual income to enjoy life, and shower her clients, friends, and those she loved with gifts. He also knows she never saw a day of interacting with clients or customers as work.
“People would ask for her, and it’s very hard to explain why other than my mother was just being herself and people just enjoyed being around her. I trained our agents around what I saw my mother doing. She seldom talked about the business. She talked about her family, and their family, and they loved being around her. When people like to be around you, they tell others about you, and these relationships lasted long after she sold the houses…She understood naturally that she was promoting herself and that was the goal, not necessarily selling a house,” he shared. She also invested heavily in advertising on things like billboards, which is part of what continues to strengthen her memory even now.
The day Lilly Loraine Belcher passed, she transitioned peacefully with a radiance of red cardinals in the tree visible through her window, a moment that still leaves Timothy very emotional to share and simply astounded by to this day. She was mourned by family and friends, even throughout the community where the city placed her obituary up on the billboard next to the major interstate where she regularly advertised.
Lilly added Timothy as her beneficiary when she began sponsoring with EXIT Realty as a beautiful gesture and future investment in him, when he was the broker at their office. But it would be decades later before he realized just how much that was and really meant.
“She said, ‘I realize I can’t pay you what you’re worth.’ It was a sacrifice for my wife and I to go into the business and she said, ‘hopefully it pays off.’ And it did, he said of the $52,000 he’s received and shared with his sister to date. “When mom passed away, on her death bed she said, ‘Tim there’s a debit card in my desk drawer at home.’ When she died, there was $25,000 on that card. They sent her mail to us that was still at her office and there was over $50,000 in checks.”
Having been raised in a simpler time, where he and his family lived on the same rural road as his grandparents’ farm along with several aunts, uncles and cousins, Timothy feels blessed for Lilly’s financial legacy saying, “It was a pleasant surprise. I think my mother was just trying to compensate me, but I know her well enough to know she’d want me to take care of my sister. We use the money to pay off debts; both mom’s and ours, though she didn’t have a whole lot. As it stands right now, we own a commercial property that we don’t owe anything on, and I attribute that all to my mother. She was a very generous person and a special lady.”
