- Ebby Halliday
Infobox Person
image_size = 150px
name = Ebby Halliday
caption =
birth_date = birth date and age|1911|3|9
birth_place =United States
death_date =
death_place =
occupation = Founder of Ebby Halliday RealtorsEbby Halliday (born
March 9 ,1911 ) is an Americanrealtor who founded Ebby Halliday Realtors, which now sells more homes than any other broker inTexas and ranks No. 23 in the nation.She is one of the first successful female
entrepreneur s inDallas and she claims that being a woman never discouraged her. She has been commended by many in the Dallas business and real estate communities. And Halliday, at 96, still drives herself to work every day and, as chairman of the board of her company, is very active in its management.Halliday graduated from high school in
Abilene, Kansas in 1929. Even though theGreat Depression was burying the financial well-being of millions, she got a $10-a-week job selling women’s hats atThe Jones Store inKansas City . In less than a year, she was the top salesperson. In 1938, she was asked to take over the millinery department at Dallas’ W.A. Green Store. Soon she had her own Dallas boutique, Ebby’s Hats.One day in 1945, a developer stopped by her store to see her. “Ebby, I’ve built a bunch of houses out of concrete. Everyone says they’re ugly. Must be, I haven’t sold a one. I figure if you can sell my wife some of those awful hats she comes home with, selling my concrete houses will be a piece of cake for you.”
Ebby took the challenge, fussied them up with carpet, curtains and cottage furniture, and dumped all of them within a year – the two-bedrooms for $7,000 and the three-bedrooms for $9,500. And that’s when she knew she was meant to be in the real estate business.
She divorced and subsequently married former
FBI agent, Maurice Acers, and together they built Ebby Halliday, Realtors, into a company of more than twenty-five offices, twelve hundred agents, and the company that in 2005 participated in $3.8 billion of sales for 17,500 Dallas area families.External links
* [http://www.ebby.com/about/about.shtml Official site]
* [http://www.realtor.org/rmomag.NSF/files/TOPcompanies-sales.pdf/$FILE/TOPcompanies-sales.pdf Top 280 Companies ranked by 2003 sales volume] – [http://www.realtor.org realtor.org]
* [http://www.fbchamber.com/feb_06.pdf February 2006 Newsletter] – Farmers Branch Chamber of Commerce
* [http://realtytimes.com/rtapages/20050314_legendebby.htm Yellow Rose Named For Texas Legend Ebby Halliday]
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