The introduction runs long; it has to. By the time Patsy Johnson and Sheila Ogle wrap up, they have covered four decades in business, a stack of awards, a run for mayor of Raleigh, and a roster of boards and foundations that stretches from education to healthcare. Then Billie Redmond reaches the lectern.
“I’m sorry y’all had to listen to all that,” she says to the crowd filling The Umstead’s ballroom during the annual Women of Western Wake Forum.
Laughter fills the room, but the deflection is pure Billie. In 1984, after starting her career in property management, she founded TradeMark Properties. In doing so, she became the first woman to own an independent commercial real estate company in the Raleigh area.
Today, TradeMark is the Triangle’s largest woman-owned boutique commercial real estate firm. Billie was named one of Cary Magazine’s Women of Western Wake in 2009 — and this fall, 17 years later, she returned to the Forum to accept the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Billie was also the first woman to receive the Triangle Commercial Real Estate Women’s Impact Award, and she has collected Triangle Business Journal’s Legacy Award, its Women in Business Lifetime Achievement Award, and a spot among its top CEOs, plus GlobeSt.’s Women of Influence Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the YWCA’s Academy of Women. Even so, as she shares when interviewed at the event on September 25, this one caught her off guard.
Back in 2009, when she was honored as a Woman of Western Wake, some of the joy Billie experienced in her community came from cooking at Pleasant Grove Church in Cary.
“I was so surprised,” she says. “Think of the women they could choose. … There are so many women who aren’t necessarily well known, but they’re just quietly going about amazing lives and amazing work.”
Earlier in the day, Chief Photographer Jonathan Fredin — who shot Billie’s 2009 profile in the kitchen at Pleasant Grove Church, back when she told the magazine that cooking was her favorite thing — had one question for her: How does she manage to look exactly the same?
Her answer is a single word. “Joy.”
Billie grew up in Eden, a small textile town just this side of the Virginia border in central North Carolina. Her grandmother’s advice — do the right thing for the right reason, all the time, and it will always work out — has guided her ever since. For years, the story Billie told was of a woman owning and leading a company in a male-dominated industry. Now, she says, that story has run its course. Women fill every corner of commercial real estate: investment sales, banking, appraisals, development, leasing.
“So that’s an old story,” she says. “I’m in a new season of life.”
It’s a season that has reshaped what she tells the young women she mentors: “If you live long enough, it’s amazing what you learn.” The advice she’d give now is different from what she would have said in her 40s and 50s, built on “more experience, more wisdom, a lot more errors,” she admits.
She also thinks about missed opportunities, and why she missed them. “For lack of confidence, for lack of exposure, for lack of having an advocate,” she says. “Don’t underestimate the value of having an advocate.”
The industry itself has changed, too. When Billie started out, Raleigh was small enough for one broker to know the whole market. Now, she says, there’s too much in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh for even a specialist to know it all. Women, she believes, have brought energy, excitement, and a collaborative spirit to the field. When a new female executive moves to town, Billie and a wider circle take her in, sharing about everything from dentists to hairdressers to veterinarians.
“I’ve had so many women say to us, ‘Oh, my goodness, I came from Dallas or DC or Chicago. Women don’t do that,’” she recalls. Then, again diverting any attention outward, “Maybe that’s the charm of the South.”
“Doing good is good for business,” she affirms, then, with a sincere smile, quickly adds a caveat: “Not the reason you should do it.”
Money matters, she explains, but so do expertise, energy, and presence. Billie has served on the WakeMed Health and Hospitals board for 10 years, two of them as chair, helping steer a $3 billion organization with more than 8,000 employees. “I think about that in relationship to my little company,” she jokes. Banking taught her a whole different language. So did medicine.
Billie receives her award at the 2026 Women of Western Wake Forum, held on September 25 at The Umstead Hotel and Spa.
“In every community situation that I’ve had the privilege to serve or lead, I’ve learned more than I’ve given,” she says.
Having just finished her term on the William Peace University board, Billie now serves on two boards (down from four or five at her busiest). Before saying yes to anything nowadays, she asks herself what the commitment will really require, and what she can really add.
“You should never be miserable as a volunteer,” she says. If a friend recruits you and you realize, I just don’t have a heart for this; it doesn’t bring me joy, her advice is simple: “Look for something else to do. Because there’s so much to do.”
Billie’s success has not come without cost. Asked what she has given up, she doesn’t hesitate. “My children would say, ‘time with family.’ You can only do so many of those 7:30 breakfasts and those 6:30 receptions or board meetings at night.” Her one rule was that the family always had dinner together, even if dinner was at 4 o’clock.
“That whole life-work balance thing,” she says knowingly, “some man made that up. There’s no such thing.” What there are, she explains, are seasons when life is simply out of balance. “It doesn’t mean it’s bad. It usually means it might not be sustainable.”
Community is one of TradeMark’s five core values — along with excellence, creativity, capability, and character — and Billie has a story that shows what it looks like in practice. An elderly client who was hospitalized needed to marry quickly and had documents to sign first. TradeMark sent a notary he knew straight to his hospital room.
“People don’t forget,” she says. “They know you care.”
That care runs inward, too. TradeMark employees stay an average of 20 years, and three men at TradeMark are currently still working at 83 years old. “They don’t want to be anywhere else,” she says. The office also just added five new women, all of them young — including a digital marketer from Bosnia whom Billie mentors. “I don’t understand anything she does except the end product,” she says with a laugh.
What comes next is personal. Billie is assembling affordable-housing professionals and service providers to build a small cottage community for the chronically unhoused, and she hopes to deliver it in three years or less. “I’m confident that we will do both, she says of the fundraising and connections ahead. “It’s that project of your heart.”
Once she gets past that introduction in the ballroom, Billie quotes “To whom much is given, much is expected,” and shares how in it she hears a call to both gratitude and stewardship. She thanks the people she has walked alongside, then turns the moment outward, urging the room to keep investing in themselves, in each other, and in the neighbors who need them most.
Seventeen years after that photo shoot in a church kitchen, the recipe hasn’t changed much. Do the right thing for the right reason. Show up. And find the work that brings you joy.
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