Debbie Gibbs in the dining room of a Cary Street Road home for sale
It’s a crisp spring morning on Towana Road in Richmond’s Near West End. Well-heeled real estate agents click up the brick front walk of this Roselawn home during a broker’s open house hosted by Debbie Gibbs, agent with The Steele Group/Sotheby’s International Realty and one of Richmond’s top real estate agents.
Agents enter the foyer of this classic brick-and-slate Cape — now listed at a cool $1.15 million — and begin the oohing and aahing.
After personal greetings, Gibbs gives her elevator pitch: The clients, a young family from Atlanta, bought the house a few years ago and did a two-story addition, including a new kitchen and family room and master suite above.
Every room in this 1935 Cape is sun-drenched, freshly painted, clutter-free and meticulously maintained. The private yard is the perfect mix of grass, brick pathways and landscaped beds, with a fenced garden tucked in the back.
One agent enters the home and says what everyone is thinking: “Do people really live like this?” Gibbs insists they do. “I didn’t have to do a thing!” she says.
Gibbs knows high-end real estate. According to an annual list published by Richmond BizSense of the top 10 highest-priced home sales, in 2018 Debbie Gibbs was a buyer’s or seller’s agent for half of them — all priced at more than $1.75 million. In 2017, she was the listing agent for the year’s top sale, a $3.3 million home on Sulgrave Road in Windsor Farms.
Yet Gibbs’ clients are not exclusively high-end. Her listings run the gamut of price ranges, home styles, neighborhoods and demographics: first-time homebuyers, retirees hoping to downsize and everyone in between.
Gibbs, though small in stature, is mighty. Last year, she says, she sold 53 units of property worth a total of just over $39 million.
No Strangers
Ask Gibbs how she does it, and she’ll tell you exactly how: “I work hard.” She works seven days a week, reporting to the office most days by 8:30 a.m., maybe earlier, often not returning home until 8:30 or 9 p.m. “My clients give me energy,” she says. She also works out every day — “Treadmill, weights … I have my program.” Every day? “Every day.”
Gibbs’ phone is always ringing, or pinging with text messages. But you’ll never catch her weary or frazzled by the pace. She’s cool and collected, turned out in stylish, tailored clothing, hair in its signature updo. Conversations, pleasant or difficult, are peppered with sincere “honeys” and “sweeties.”
Gibbs, 73, made her way into real estate 40 years ago at the urging of friend Phoebe Hall, a Richmond attorney, who died earlier this year. Gibbs started her career with Proctor Realty, which became Virginia Realty and Relocation Services. That firm affiliated with Sotheby’s in 2014 and is now The Steele Group/Sotheby’s International Realty.
“When Debbie walks into a crowd, there’s no stranger.” —Bill Steele, The Steele Group/ Sotheby’s International Realty
Bill Steele, broker/owner along with his wife, Pooh, says Gibbs and her husband, Randy, are like family. “We’ve been working together a long time, but I feel like it was yesterday that we got started,” he says. He attributes Gibbs’ success to her way with people. “When Debbie walks into a crowd, there’s no stranger,” he says. “You walk into a restaurant with her, and she’ll go to every table and talk to everyone. Not only that, she has them eating out of her hand before it’s all over.”
The Gibbses and Steeles occasionally vacation together — “When you can get her to take a vacation,” Steele says. “We continuously have to tell her to take time off.”
Gibbs insists her schedule isn’t as full as it sounds. “Oh, but today I’m having lunch with girlfriends,” she says almost apologetically, as if lunch is an extraordinary indulgence in a workday. She will also “take a half day here and there,” she says. At the end of the day, it boils down to this: “When I’m here, I’m here,” she says. “You can’t do this business part-time.”
Indeed, Gibbs has been going full throttle for decades. “When you are raising your children, you have to be there for them. I was there,” Gibbs says. “But when [my daughter] went to college, that’s when I really dug in.” That was nearly 30 years ago.
Gibbs’ daughter, Carter Miller, confirms that her mother is dedicated to her work. “We call her ‘the brain surgeon’ — always on call,” Miller says. “She may be in a ball gown at an event, but she’ll take a client call.” Miller will also tell you that Gibbs is a devoted grandmother — “Dede” — to her children, son Jack, 21, and daughter Carrington, 14.
Steele Group/Sotheby’s associate Maria Brent, who often assists Gibbs with listings, calls her a true friend and mentor. “I think we all just watch her in awe,” she says. “She’s taught me everything I know about real estate. For 12 years I have sat next to this powerhouse. Even when she’s on the phone, I’m like a sponge.”
She says Gibbs is generous with her knowledge and her time. “She is on call for anything we need from her. When she gets here to the office in the morning, if anyone is circling [with a question or challenge], she’ll drop everything and help.”
In addition to Gibbs’ “natural ability with people,” Brent is inspired by how Gibbs has built her business in Richmond. Go on a ride-along with Gibbs, says Brent, and she’ll have a story for nearly every house you pass, whether she listed it at one time, helped someone buy it or knows its whole history. “For a business that’s not easy, she makes it look like a breeze,” Brent says.
The business of people runs in the family. The daughter of a doctor turned hotelier, Gibbs grew up in the Bahamas, where her family relocated from Princeton, New Jersey, to manage 10 hotels. She attended Rosarian Academy, a boarding school in Palm Beach, Florida, and made her way to Virginia through her father’s work on Keswick Hall. Here, she met her husband Randy, known as “Bubba,” the nickname that stuck when given to him by grandson Jack when he was a baby. They have called Richmond home for the entirety of their 50-year marriage.
‘You Never Know’
Back at the open house, Gibbs continues to greet agents. She wanders the rooms, pointing out distinguishing features.
A colleague asks Gibbs in a conspiratorial tone: “How many showings do you have today?” Gibbs responds without flinching. “Thirteen,” she says. The colleague shakes her head in mock surrender, suggesting she and her clients are out of the running. They’re weary from previous multiple-offer situations, she says. “Bring them by,” Gibbs insists. “You never know.”
Another agent says goodbye, offering lavish praise for the property. She says she may have some clients who are interested, but it might be out of their price range. “Plus, it’ll be gone tomorrow,” she says to Gibbs, baiting her. Gibbs says, “You don’t know that.”
Gibbs uses a quiet moment to take a phone call. It’s, “Hi sweetie,” after the first ring and then right down to business: lining up a photographer for a new listing. Gibbs is particular about her listing photos; lighting and angles can make or break the way the home shows on paper and online. “This is not like buying a pair of shoes, know what I mean?” she says.
Meanwhile, another agent and her client have been in the home for nearly an hour. They are discussing details like the location of the microwave and trash bins — the conversation of someone who is pretty interested in the home, but as Gibbs says, “You never know.”
Debbie Gibbs (left) does whatever it takes to help clients. Here, she helps Molly Congdon prepare her Grove Avenue home for sale, with assistance from Gibbs’ husband, Randy.
From Making Beds to Closing a Deal
Gibbs is humble when it comes to her success and all its trappings. She’ll concede she just bought a new SUV to ferry clients —“It’s safer, you know” — after “running the wheels off” a four-door sedan with 250K miles on it. And her own home, for example, is a charming but modest colonial in the West End neighborhood of Westham, where she and her husband have lived for 46 years. “Am I a good Realtor or what?” she says laughing. Wouldn’t a real estate agent — particularly over the course of a long and successful career — be seduced by the next hot property? “We didn’t need anything more than what we had,” she says, “and that’s why we never moved.”
Gibbs has seen the business go through many changes, perhaps the biggest being the advent of the internet. She recalls a time even before the Multiple Listing Service, the national database of real estate listings. “We’d get a book [of listings] once a week! It’s a whole different ballgame now,” she says. Online capabilities have been life-changing, she says, making it easier to market properties. And clients come to her that much more educated about their options after doing some of their own research. Even so, says Gibbs, “At the end of the day, it’s the individual agent who works hard and does what they need to do” to close deals.
This instant access to knowledge perhaps heightens the challenge of the current market, which Gibbs says is a lack of inventory. Still, Gibbs takes nothing for granted and approaches each day — and each deal — with the same tenacity. “You learn something new every day,” she says. “You never know it all. That’s when you make mistakes,” she laughs. Know it all about what, exactly? Housing? The market itself? Clients’ reactions? “Everything,” she says.
And Gibbs, though she has associates who happily assist her, is the one in the trenches. If she has to, “I physically do it all,” she says. “I go in and make beds, wash dishes.” She waves this off as if it is no big deal. If potential buyers want to see a property and it’s not ready, Gibbs will make it ready. “I ask them, ‘Will you let me tidy up?’ ” she says.
When prepping listings to go on the market, Gibbs is gentle but firm with homeowners. Surfaces needs to be free of stuff, pure and simple. “I tell my clients, ‘This is not how you live; this is how you need to sell your home.’ ” She says this aesthetic comes naturally; she’s always been tidy, which she attributes to her upbringing in a convent boarding school. “If we have someone that likes to collect things, we have to de-collect them,” she says with a grin. Not permanently, of course, and no judgement. “We get lots of [storage] pods.”
Seeing Potential
Indeed, her desire to make life easier and better for her clients is genuine and obvious. For her recent listing in a prime location south of Cary Street Road, Gibbs had 66 showings the first day and 18 contracts, garnering a “terrific price for the sellers,” who were going into retirement. “That’s what does my heart so good,” she says.
Tyler Kilpatrick is the daughter-in-law of these sellers. She and her husband, Mark, worked carefully to help his parents, now in their late 80s, find just the right agent to list the home. They hired Gibbs for her enthusiasm and grace. “Debbie could see the potential when we couldn’t even see it,” she says. “She told my mother-in-law, ‘You’ve got some lovely things, but here’s what I think I’d like to show.’ She made her feel wonderful about how she had it decorated.” Gibbs suggested, for example, removing window treatments to showcase the property’s beautiful windows — something the Kilpatricks hadn’t ever thought of doing.
In addition to Gibbs’ securing well over asking price, the Kilpatricks were most impressed with her level of devotion. “Everything we ever needed, she said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ And she did it all with such grace and kindness.” One point Gibbs drove home during the process was reassuring the family how much a new family was going to love living in the home. “That meant the world to them, thinking that someone was going to love their house,” Kilpatrick says.
Gibbs also has a special affinity for first-time buyers. “I just love them; they are so excited,” she says. She tells of selling five houses to five couples who were friends, all within a mile of each other. These friends conspired to text Gibbs on Christmas to thank her and tell her how much they love their new homes.
Blair Wyatt is one of those first-timers, who says she still texts Gibbs all the time, just because. She and her husband, Michael, wanted to move to a particular West End neighborhood from their Short Pump townhouse in 2008. They looked at several properties with Gibbs, and nothing felt quite right. While standing in one home, Gibbs pointed to the house across the street, telling the Wyatts she knew it was going on the market.
“I said, ‘What house?’ ” says Wyatt of the small Cape Cod hidden by trees and overgrowth. She says that Gibbs helped them understand how they were buying for the location they wanted, and that they could make the home what they wanted it to be — which they have done. “She has an amazing way of putting people in the neighborhood where they are meant to be,” Wyatt says.
Another Successful Sale
Gibbs’ open house in Roselawn did indeed yield good, speedy results; the home sold that day, with multiple offers. And Gibbs continues to work long hours to help clients buy and sell their homes. But will this real estate powerhouse ever slow down?
“Well,” says Steele, “She may have mentioned something about it about 12 years ago.”
