Barbara Parker

Barbara Parker

Community Advocate • Lover of Beautiful Spaces • Flower Gardener • Arts Supporter • Former Radio DJ • Here for the Long Haul

Some people are born in the place they call home. Others find it somewhere along the way.

For Barbara Parker, Russell County became that place 50 years ago. Originally from Danville, she came to Southwest Virginia as a transplant and, somewhere between building a life here and falling in love with the community around her, stopped thinking of it that way.

Russell County was simply home.

Her path into real estate arrived much the same way. A door opened at just the right time. In the spring of 2009, Barbara had the opportunity to complete a real estate course just as Bee Stuart was looking for an agent for her growing firm.

Seventeen years later, she's still here. And she's still genuinely grateful for every person who trusts her to become part of their story.

Barbara has spent those years helping buyers and sellers throughout Russell and Washington counties and across Southwest Virginia. Perhaps because she knows what it's like to make a new place your own, she has a special place in her heart for people relocating to the area. People who are searching not just for the right house, but for the place where life might begin to feel like home.

And Barbara knows that sometimes, finding that place takes a little while.

If it means looking at house after house until one finally gives you that feeling, she'll keep looking. If selling means waiting patiently for the right person to walk through the door, she'll wait with you.

Barbara is here for the long haul.

She doesn't see real estate as a race toward a closing date. For her, some of the best parts happen along the way. The anticipation, the possibilities, the conversations, and the joy when everything comes together.

That love of people follows Barbara well beyond real estate. For more than 30 years, she has poured her time into the community she calls home, supporting causes close to her heart through organizations such as the Russell County Arts Program, Cancer Outreach Foundation, SWVCC Festival of the Arts and others throughout the region.

For the past decade, one tradition has become especially meaningful: helping with the annual fundraiser benefiting the Imagination Library, putting books into the hands of local children and helping open up whole new worlds, one story at a time. Last year brought their highest fundraising total yet—which, knowing Barbara, probably just means there's a new number to beat.

She's given back to her profession, too, serving the Southwest Virginia Association of Realtors as Treasurer, President-Elect, President and Past President. In 2017, her peers named her Realtor of the Year.

And when Barbara isn't thinking about someone else's house?

There are flowers to grow, rooms to decorate, and spaces just waiting to become a little more beautiful. Home, it seems, follows Barbara even after the workday ends.

Then there's the part of her story you probably wouldn't guess from meeting her at a showing:

Barbara was a radio DJ in college.

After 17 years in real estate, thousands of miles driven and more than a few houses walked through, what she loves about this work is still wonderfully simple:

“The best part of helping someone buy or sell a property is sharing in their expectations and joys.”

And maybe that's Barbara in a sentence.

She'll share in the searching, the waiting, the dreaming and when you finally find your place, she'll be there to share in the joy, too.