How a $450M Career Was Built on Telling Clients the Truth with Julie Grace Burke

The way that the industry decides who will and will not be put in the role of fiduciary adviser also fascinates me and I find it to be disappointing. If you're 18 years old and you graduated high school and you sit through a 60-hour class and you happen to have the kind of mind that's like a pretty good multiplechoice tester for completely inane mediocre that you will never use in your life. Congratulations, you're a real estate agent.

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Today's guest has closed more than 450 million in real estate sales over her career. Built on a mix of sharp strategy and what she calls disarming honesty in some of the highest stakes deals in the business, Julie Grace Burke is the founder of team JGB at Compass. And she spent over two decades becoming one of the top 20 luxury agents in Greenwich, Connecticut, a market where the properties, the stakes, and the personalities are all outsized. Before real estate, she built a career in public relations and fundraising.

And that background shows up in everything she does. She doesn't just negotiate a deal, she manages the whole story around it. And she's known for keeping clients grounded when the emotions get intense. One of the things I find most interesting about Julie is how local she stayed even at that level. She volunteers on boards, coach lacrosse, and has built her business on being the person families call long after closing, not just during the transaction.

If you want a real look at what it takes to combine sharp strategy with real humanity at the highest levels of real estate, this is the one. Here's my conversation with Julie Grace Burke. Welcome. Thanks for joining. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Excellent. So, I want to start with this. You spent your early career in public relations and fundraising and uh also 10 years as a full-time mom and event management before real estate.

What is the moment that you realize that those skills, the ones that nobody necessarily thinks of as sales skills, were actually going to be your unfair advantage in high stakes negotiation? >> I didn't know. I think that, you know, hindsight's 2020. So now you look back, I mean my very first job out of school was at a psychiatric hospital. This was 35 years ago. We didn't celebrate mental health the way we should and the way we do now. So you were fundraising for services that people didn't want to acknowledge that anybody ever needed.

So you learned sort of this weird match of you have to ask for something if you want to get it, but you had to sort of be very discreet about the topic at hand. And you that was all wrapped in having just the right people skills and reading emotions and knowing when is the right time to lean in and the right time to step back. And I think I didn't realize I was learning all those things at the time cuz I was like 23 and just trying to like have a job and get my then boyfriend to marry me.

And you know now I look at it and I'm like wow that was really fertile training ground for highlevel negotiations especially with things like real estate where at the highest levels you're so often operating with under an NDA with people who really value privacy more than anything else or you're dealing with family office representatives. Sometimes the principal isn't even the first person that you meet and all these layers and how they come together.

And then when you put being a mom on top of it and you have three exhausted kids, no patience, and there's like every single temptation in the checkout line at the grocery store. Like that's I'd rather that's harder to negotiate than NATO. So like you've learned along the way. You've picked up skills. Most of the event stuff I did was all as a volunteer. It was the years, early years in which my kids were fortunate to go to private schools in Greenwich.

And you know, every time you turned around, they wanted somebody to run the book fair or share the silent auction or you were constantly you were doing it peer-to-peer. At some point, a lot of us wake up and are like, "Okay, we've been doing for free what people get paid for. Maybe we can just go out get paid for it." >> So, you started out as a solo agent, correct? I mean, most of us do. >> Yeah. >> Right. and you had years of success as a solo agent, but then you ended up making the leap to founding and leading a team.

And one of the things I see a lot with high performers is that they resist that move because often they feel that they can't trust anyone to do it as well as they do. So what finally pushed you to do it? What made you feel confident in delegating and you know and what almost stopped you if anything? >> My path to it was completely different than anyone else's. I didn't want to be part of a team. I didn't necessarily need to lead a team. Although it has fed I always wanted to be a teacher.

I trained to be a teacher and I didn't end up teaching but I coached youth lacrosse and that's my natural space. Think being a mom being a sort of a nurturing person um while also being brutally competitive and kind of a shark. So like it's a delicate balance. But what happened was that I looked at 10 years ago, let's say, in my journey. I looked at a couple of the brokers who were older women, much older than me at the time, 25 years older than me, who had been in it for a long time and built these unbelievable careers.

and technology started to come on the scene and it went from it's kind of cool to bring an iPad to the listing presentation to if you are not putting everything on Instagram and LinkedIn and developing its own web page and whatever you are you're in the dust and I thought to I went to a couple of people I really respected who've been in the business forever and I said look there is no gold watch and there's no 401k and very often there was a meme going around Instagram for a while a couple of years ago.

And anyone who has children will remember cuz every mom started crying. It was like you never knew the last day that you carried your child. You never knew the last time that when your son ran over to you and it just hurt himself and maybe he was older, 8 n 10 even, that he jumped up in your arms and you picked him up and you actually carried him somewhere. But one day back in all of our histories was the last day that we carried our children. And it was poignant and it made it was like a cotton commercial and it made everybody cry.

But I looked at sort of older real estate agents in the business the way it's been set up for such a long time and I was like, you know, you don't know for many people they don't make a conscious decision to this is my retirement. One day they've just done their last deal.

And if you don't hang up your shingle and take your family and move to Florida, if you stay in your town and do something different and you still help a friend's kid every once in a while, you go from building a business to being at the top of the business to really just starting on the on the downslide, especially if technology comes in and moves the business away from you at a pace that not that you can't keep up with it, but you just don't want to learn all the new stuff. You know, you're 75.

>> This is a business where it's so much about you for so many people that it's not like you're going to sell it, >> but you also can stay in it. You can be successful and reap the benefit forever if you partner strategically. So, I went to three different people, two where I had real conversations with them, one in my own firm, one not even in my own firm at the time, and I said, "Look, you've known me for years. You don't seem to have a succession plan.

None of these businesses are sellable, and you kind of keep hiring these like mediocre assistants who are never going to be able to take your business." or you bring on a junior an assistant who really you can see right off the bat would be an awesome agent and then they leave you and they end up going to compete with you. So, I would like to come and be your silent partner. I will come with you on every listing appointment. I will work the new fangled iPad. I will run the Instagram account. My name won't be on anything.

I'm not saying co-list, but your your clients will be so comfortable with me that it will be one of the rare instances where there can be a completely successful handoff that you can go to Florida in the beginning. Maybe it's 1 month and then it's 3 months and then it's 6 months and then you can move there and for the rest of your living breathing days, you will trust me and your clients will successfully make the transition thereby setting up some type of annuity because you will always get the referral check. Always until you're 100.

They all said no. Some people have gone out and partnered up and tried to make big teams of their own. And some of them I >> Wait, why did they say no? >> I don't know if it was that teams were never a thing in Greenwich. They're still super new here. I don't know if they It's always been a competitive but kind of solitary business. And I think people get maybe threatened or worried that somehow I don't know, you're trying to take a piece of it.

I think there's a component with people who have been in a business a long time that you can stay in this business for a long time. You can still be an active agent, if not a minimum, a referring agent when you're literally 90 years old. So, you don't want to feel aged out or edged out or pushed out in any way. And the irony is what I was offering would keep you in it longer. >> What do you feel like they were when you approached them with this, was there any reaction of like, what are you talking about? I'm never retiring.

Or like >> there was I'm not ready. There was I'm not ready and I wasn't suggesting and maybe I didn't I hadn't you know I was 10 year I was younger maybe I didn't explain it as carefully as I meant to. It's not like I went with a written business plan. I went with genuine care in in my heart and a desire to obviously not watch other people come in and pick off that business. And if they were going to like if you put me in place that won't happen.

So I'll secure it for myself but I'm also securing it for you because these were people I've known my whole life and I love them. So they said no.

I unders which I understood I understood it was different and I went home one day to my husband and said I'm so frustrated I'm sad I'm sad for them I'm sad for me this would have been mutually beneficial like how do I make sure that I don't think that way that I am not the person who who would say no in 30 years >> and he said >> say yes to the younger person find the person now and there had been a young woman in my office she was at Compass before I came here and I just she was here she was you know working doing I think with somebody else I can't remember you looked at Liz Leon you talked to her for five minutes and you were like she has got it and I looked at her and I thought we're 20 years apart this is me 20 years ago I would never have worked for some greedy you know team leader who just wanted someone to do all the grunt work or who wanted to give them a really terrible low split to make as much money off them as they can until they, you know, flew off on their own.

And I thought, I've listened to every single principal agent and team leader since I've come to Compass because teams are more of a thing complain about bringing on admins and then as soon as they get really capable and the business is running super smoothly, that admin wants to go off and be an agent because they want to make real money. And I thought, everyone keeps doing the same thing and they keep complaining about the same thing and they have to replace their admins and those team members don't stay with them.

and they leave and compete with them. And I just thought there has to be a different way to do it. So I approached this young woman and I said, "Look, you got to take a step back to take two steps forward. You come sit with me. I'm not unwilling to share. I am an open book. You are I'm going to trust you from day one. You're going to get every secret. You're going to listen to every phone call. I'm going to give you every trick of the trade that I've learned for 20 years.

And in return, you are going to work so hard and do so well that you will come to me one day and say, you know, I just looked at the numbers and I outsold you last year and it's time for me to be a full equal partner. And I won't say, no way. I will be like, that's the dream. That should be the goal. >> And then when I'm 77 and she's 57, I can go to Florida if I want to. and the whole team will. My goal is to never have it.

I just want this little bubble that we have of these three fabulous people, myself included, to just be like this little awesome family forever. Team leaders don't succeed and teams aren't happy because nobody does it for the right reason. If you ask them the reason, they really can't. We want to cover more territory or we want to do I mean, the real bottom line is you somehow think it's going to bring you a lot more volume so you'll get more credit within your company. >> Mhm.

and you're going to make money off these people and it's going to put more money in your pocket. >> So, what's the right reason? >> If I could do anything, I'd be a manager. Like, I would be an office manager. That would be my dream, but I out dramatically out earn office managers. So, I can't I can't do that. And I like having the flexibility in my own schedule. I think the right answer for anything is just honestly examining what your personal goal is.

My personal goal was to have the business be a little more fun, a little bit less lonely >> because it is lonely. People don't realize, >> no, really lonely. Feed my need to coach and nurture and mentor and to set up my own succession plan so that I didn't react to someone like Liz coming to me 20 years from now the way others reacted to me when I offered it to them. That's what I wanted. >> Yeah, it's very inspiring. You were looking beyond yourself as well here. Okay.

Okay, I want to talk about when things get messy, how you deal with that. You know, when financing falls apart and inspection turns something up that people freak out about, seller gets cold feet, etc. I want to know about that. >> I think a lot of it is education ahead of time. Like if you bring out I want to work with the whole spectrum.

So I want to start with the kid just out of school whose job is not in the city but is actually in you know Greenwich and they want to know do we have any can you rent an apartment on Greenwich Avenue if you're working out here? And I want to go with that kid all the way until that child is, you know, has gotten married, bought a condo, bought a house, traded up to another house, is now selling the family house. Like I've said before, I'd rather have 10 clients use me three times than 30 clients use me once. I don't care how big the volume is.

You want that relationship. The disarming honesty part, I think, comes right from the very beginning because part of what is wrapped in that like, yeah, I'm funny. I, you know, I call it like it is. is I think that's refreshing to people. I'm really not salesy. I will never be the number one agent in Greenwich. I talk so many more people out of buying a property than into buying a property that if you judge me based on that, I'm actually a horrible salesperson.

But I think when you have to deliver a difficult message, if you have developed a friendliness and a genuine rapport and you understand that I truly truly have your best interest at heart, it is much easier to deliver news even if it's bad. And I think it starts with an education part from the very beginning. So I probably say things we're not really supposed to say. Like I will really tell you the truth. I'll if I don't give you more information than you can just find online. I don't know what value I bring.

I don't know why you're using a broker in the first place. All those little tips and tricks and secrets and what neighborhood do people really love and what school do people really want to be in. Okay. If I can't tell you something legally, certainly I can't, you know, write it. I will connect you with two moms whose kids have gone to the two different schools and let you have those conversations, but I'll find a way to get you information. I think that young people, especially firsttime buyers, are afraid of the wrong things.

If you take a young couple into, we have a lot of antiques around here and charming old farm houses and you know, you take young people, first-time buyers into a property and you're walking through before the inspection, you're just looking and there's a little, not even a puddle, but like a damp spot in the corner of maybe the unfinished basement. And I look up at some pipes and I'm like, "Oh, that's asbestous wrap. We're gonna have to get that out of here." Those kids are absolutely freaked out by the asbestous.

They're like running out the door and getting in the car and they're like, "Yeah, we grew up. Everyone's got Yeah. basement. Everyone has dampness in the They should be scared of the water and the asbestous. My guy can come remove it. It's like $4,000. We'll get a credit from the seller. They'll air test. It'll be So, I just think people really don't know what they don't know." And >> yeah, >> it's frightening.

And when you can turn things around and tell people realistically what they need to worry about and what they don't and sellers, it's worse. It's very difficult with a seller. They love their house. They love their property. We have it going on in Greenwich right now. Okay. Across the board. The buyer today is not the buyer of now. Some of these people have been in their houses for 50 years.

You know, when we went out and bought our first houses, it was like you just looked at the bones and you were you expected that you would do work and over time you might even do an addition. It was going to be a long-term investment. There was maintenance and effort that went into owning a house. People today have watched a lot of HGTV. They want to walk in.

They want to slide the god if I see one more barn door over on their, you know, family room and go in and sit in front of their Samsung frame TV and they don't want to have to do anything to tell today's seller who has a home that is top quality, absolutely magnificent, that we need to like strip it and paint it white in order to get the most eyeballs on it. That's a that's a hard thing. And so a lot of people will just go along with what the seller wants. Like I will not take if some I have sellers call me.

We're going to give an open listing to like three different agents and you can compete and see who No, no, thank you. I don't need that business. >> So that I don't hear of that over here in Portland. >> It's where but it happens especially now that so much is off market. They think they can kind of get away with it. It's like buyers, the poor buyers today, they still think that they can somehow achieve a better outcome or save money if they come without an agent. And I'm like, you know what?

There are things that you can do for yourself in life where you can hire someone, it'd be easier and maybe a nicer experience, but you can do it yourself. So, if you get a book out of the library and you read up and you go to Home Depot and you get the paint and the tape and whatever, you can paint your kids' bedroom. Will it be as perfect as if a top-notch painter did it? Maybe not. But you can definitely do that. But you know what I don't do? I never cut my own hair. Like, I don't fill my own cavity.

I don't you know like so I think that when it comes to advisory real estate advisory I'm amazed when people think they can sort of shortcut around it and that disarming honesty part really comes in when I am representing a buyer and they see the shiny new penny and I'm looking at them like guys there's a reason why they just painted every ceiling in here or why the basement smells like absolute fresh paint and there's nine dehumidifiers going and there's a candle in every room can seduced by the romance.

>> We're even more important in the age of AI because what we're dealing with here is all of a sudden, I mean, in a matter of months, all of a sudden, we're really seeing all of our buyers getting information from AI, which is just sickantically agreeing with whatever they say. Often, it's horrible advice. Like really horrible.

like the challenge for us and I want to know if this is true for you getting them not to to listen to us more than AI right because we know >> so I think the way that you do that or the way that I've tried to do it so far successfully >> yes >> is to come out of the starting gate with not proprietary information because the information is out there but to have more data be better informed and share it right up front.

It is amazing how far you can get by taking the most obvious and readily available information and just having it at your fingertips when someone calls you and says, "Would you come meet with me about, you know, listing my home?" And people are like, "Great." And they are busy and they either don't want to invest a ton of time because they're not sure they're going to get the listing or whatever.

When you walk in and you just say like, "When's the last time you spoke to your pool contractor?" And they're like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, he, you know, your pool went in three years ago. You don't have a CO. I'm not sure your drains were up." They're like, "What do you mean I don't?" I'm like, "Your permit's still open." And they never closed it. That's That's something I mean, you just go to town hall. It's public information. It's not hard.

But when you just do a little bit of extra work, I like read the notes from the planning and zoning meetings. I know if a neighborhood is about to have a major change or if an apartment building is about to go up right next door to you or if you know, sort of they're toying with a major construction project in town. And just offering that upfront, even if it's going to derail the deal, I'd rather have long-term respect than shortterm happy like, "Yay, I got the commission check.

These people will never use me again." >> They're also going to refer you to everybody that they know. >> Right. Right. That will help. >> I mean, give me a sense of how big Greenwich is. I've never been to Greenwich. Is it I mean, how big is it? How many neighborhoods? >> So, Greenwiches is like I think it's around 60 square miles. We've got about 65,000 people. We've got a lot of coastline which we enjoy, but we also have what we call back country where homes have 5, 10, 15 acres of land and it's heavily wooded.

You can be down at the beach in Old Greenwich and truthfully feel like you're, you know, on the Cape or Nucket or another beach town and you can drive up to where some of our private schools are in the back country and you would swear you were on a windy country road with old stone walls and beautiful foliage. you'd think you were in Vermont on an October weekend. So, we're really lucky because we have beautiful, beautiful topography and it really runs the gamut. It's expensive and it's gotten a lot more expensive recently.

So, I think that's hard for people. It's hard for kids who grew up here who are like my own who will have a hard time getting back here. >> Is there a reason it became more expensive recently besides >> Yeah, I think I think what happened So, CO happened to all of us everywhere. Greenwich was an unintended beneficiary of CO and I hate to say that because it was a scourge on the earth and so many terrible things and ruined my kid's senior year in high school. I mean like there was a lot of bad stuff that came out of it.

People got sick and we lost people. But in New York State, real estate brokerage was not an essential business and in Connecticut real estate was. And I grew up in and rye New York. It goes Ry Portchester Greenwich Connecticut on the train station. Okay. So they're one town apart. I went to high school in Greenwich. My brothers, my sister, we all went to school in Greenwich. It's one town away.

So if you were in an apartment and maybe you'd been thinking about getting out of the city anyway, you were about to have your third child or whatever and COVID hit. You couldn't go into the house that you wanted to buy. It was really hard. Nobody could show the property in Larchmont. So, if Greenwich was anywhere on your list, this is where you came. And everybody slammed in here, mostly into high-end rentals, thinking this will be temporary because I'm not a suburban person and I don't identify with the suburbs and I'm a city person.

And when you live out here for a year with three children and the inevitable COVID puppy and instead of needing like three nannies and eight drivers and and everybody's crammed in these little spaces and you're dealing with wee wee pads, you just open the door and look at the kids, send them with the puppy and say, "Everybody go play in the totally safe fenced yard with the pool and the swing set." that like 99% of the people didn't go back because here's what we also have.

For better or worse, it's an expensive, challenging place to live financially. Greenwich Avenue looks like Rodeo Drive. I mean, you've got Hermes and Sachs and all these beautiful stores. We have unbelievable restaurants. The restaurant started offering outdoor dining during CO and that stayed. It never went back. It's very cosmopolitan. It's extremely international. When you walk down Greenwich Avenue on a beautiful Sunday during brunch, I would bet you hear eight to 10 different languages by the time you get to the bottom.

That cosmopolitan thing that you need, we have a beautiful brand new art museum. We have every single activity that your child could ever want to engage in. We have about a jillion schools. So, we have the most school choice by far. We have an overwhelming number of private schools, a tremendous selection of toprated public schools, international balorate, language driven, Montasauri, single sex, co-ed, religious, secular, we have everything. You didn't really have to go back to New York, >> right?

As soon as people actually experienced it. >> A lot of financial services companies and hedge funds and PE firms especially opened offices out here and those guys didn't want to go back 5 days either. So maybe they're in the city 3 days and the women, but especially the working moms who move to life out here. How great if you can be in an office right in Greenwich. Even if you have to go four or five days, you can be here. You can sneak out at lunch or sneak out at 3, go to the lacrosse game, and go back to work.

>> It's an amazing lifestyle. >> How much of the business you do is offmarket? Is there a lot of that or? >> So here's the thing. I don't do that many transactions. If I do two transactions a month, that would be like a big year for me. Really? My biggest year ever. I probably have never done 25 transactions in a year. I'm fortunate to have a pretty high average price point. So, you know, if your average price point is like $4 million and you do 15 or 20 deals a year, that's >> incredible.

>> Yeah, >> the super high-end is increasingly offmarket, but we've done it everywhere. I do things off market unintentionally. I do believe that the fairest marketplace is the one that is open and shared. I believe that wholeheartedly. I know that in every single offmarket deal, my sister-in-law May Burke is a compass agent in Ryan, New York, and she's the one who said this to me, so I want to attribute it fairly. She probably used nicer language than I'm about to use, though. >> Hey, uh, this is not PBS.

You can say whatever you want. >> If you in every single offmarket deal, one of the parties is getting screwed. There is no doubt about it. It might be by a million dollars and it might be by $1, but either the buyer paid a little too much or a lot or the seller took a little too little or a lot because you did not expose it to the marketplace and you do not know what you would have gotten. It's an auction every time. When you go to a typical auction, you go to Sibies or whatever and there's a painting.

Like I think there should be much more transparency in our bidding process. I think the smoke and mirrors thing is silly. I'm much more open with all of the details around the way my transactions are going than most agents. I do everything I can to avoid highest and best. I don't think I've had a a bidding situation even when we've had 40 showings in two days and nine offers. >> How do you mean no bidding situation? >> No highest and best. I don't do like best offers in at 5:00 on Tuesday.

I'll do anything I can to avoid it because I truly do not think that brings the best ending to the seller. And what we're finding in Greenwich now is that everyone else is recognizing this.

And when they call for highest and best, all bids due at 5:00 on Tuesday and 11 bids come in, inevitably somehow that listing agent ends up going back to two people and saying, "You two are so close or you just need a little more or we're going to let the top people rebid." I'm like, "So highest and best didn't even mean highest and best, but what I get paid to do is negotiate. So why would I take my ability to negotiate off the table?" >> Okay, I love this. This is great because that's all we see here is highest and best.

So, walk me through it. You have a listing. It's really popular. So, you get a couple offers. >> I had it happen twice. Okay. I had it happen twice early COVID where you had a very popular listing, a listing that might not have been as popular before COVID. You knew there were going to be some issues or whatever. Sometimes people just want to win. And sometimes, especially people with a lot of money, they can afford to roll the dice on a $2,000 inspection. We had people winning the bidding war and then walking away. And it happened twice.

And I was like, this is not serving the seller and it's not serving the buyers because buyer, the guy who's in spot number two and number three, the backup biders were completely demoralized when you call them and say, "Good luck. That guy, that guy is stepping away, so now it's yours. Now they feel like a sucker. They want to know what's wrong. Why didn't the guy want it?" It just never seemed to leave anybody feeling good. Yes.

On the oneoff, you know, when it works, that all the offers come in, they're clean and lovely, there's one that's a clear standout, that buyer does every single thing they say they're going to do, and it all gets tied up beautifully at some monster number. That is wonderful, but that is not the majority of how the highest and best go in my experience. It's like real estate in general. Everyone's like, "That's so fun. It's so happy. You just go look at houses.

You get to look at pretty decorating." If I was a cobbler, my kids would have no shoes. I live in like a white 70s box condo. I couldn't I couldn't care. I can't look at the marble and tell you if it's Kolkata baloney. I don't care. I know asbestous. I know water. I'm like an attic and basement person. I have Craig on my team who's like the design guru, client experience genius person that the creative director. That's Craig's space. We do everything together. We go everywhere together. Like we're yin and yang. He's Craig is not selling.

I'm selling. Craig is just there to make everybody's experience better, to make the clients happy. I don't know. I think that highest and best thing got tricky. I think it really demoralized buyers. >> So, a few offers come in. How do you avoid then saying, "Okay, everybody, highest and best." >> I believe in disarming honesty. It's sort of like radical transparency. It's the same thing. If we have a listing that I know is coming, myself, Liz on my team, we're the licensed salespeople.

We will get it in front of our buyers first as anybody would do when it's your own listing. So, we get our buyers in there. We expose it to them. And if I'm going to have a buyer who's really interested in my listing, but it's not something that they walk in and say, "I'll pay up to have it." They're going to they want to be part of a process. That could make it confusing. I've never really had that happen. I've had it happen one time and I referred them over to a different person in my office. I don't think it's a win to be on the same side.

My goal would never ever to be have two sides of a deal. I virtually never ever have both sides of a deal. I don't want it. I'm not interested in it. I think it's a major transaction and I think every party to the transaction deserves their own representation. And I'm not saying that it's not always totally adversarial. It should be cooperative because everybody does have the same goal. So the courtroom analogy isn't quite fair because they're fighting each other in a courtroom.

But when you think about being a defendant and a plaintiff, you would never use the same lawyer. You would never use the same lawyer to argue the case in front of the judge in the courtroom for both of you. So I just feel like everyone should have their own representation. >> Yeah.

And I've always felt like if you do this side, you know, both sides of a deal, it's like even if you did the greatest job ever in the history of real estate, everyone feels like you didn't do enough because they just felt in their heart that you weren't just there for to be on their side and their advocate >> cuz you're not >> right. >> There's no there's no way that you can be. >> You can be fair.

You can be objective, but you didn't 100% commit to one side over the other because there's no possible way to do that if you're on both sides. But I think the thing about the highest and best that became an issue was so assuming that we've cleared all of our own buyers and I don't have anybody in the mix. My own buyers are cleared. We had an offering a couple of years ago where I had 32 showings in two days or 36 showings, something crazy. And these are big houses that are accompanied. I've never had a key box in my entire career.

Like I am at every single one of these properties. I met every client at the front door with their agent. I took them together and I said, "I'm telling everybody the same thing. I want the clients and agents to hear it together. This is what we're asking. This is what our most compelling offer might include. And I said it might include a number that's more than we're listed for. A very, very clean deal. A buyer who was willing to close as quickly as possible and give us a free holdover through the end of the school year.

I told every buyer and their agent exactly what my seller wanted, what would compel them to action and then I said, "We are not going to highest and best. We are not committing to wait through the weekend. When we see the offer that we cannot refuse, we will work with that offer. So if you are interested, I urge you to step up." And that's what we did. And I did it over and over and over again. >> So no deadline for offers, none of that. >> No, it's not good.

That's that only works in like a crazy hot sellers market, but we've been in a crazy hot sellers market for like four years. It hasn't dissipated at all. >> I would love to show up to a house with a buyer and have the seller agent say this to me. >> Yeah, I had somebody I mean I had somebody make an offer recently and they were giving me like a 1% binder and they wanted the signature back on the thing and I was like, "We don't do that in Greenwich." So, they're from a couple towns away and I said, "Look, yeah, we don't do that.

It's a 10% deposit with the contract. We're in a lawyer town, so I don't do the contract. It's all attorneys, I said. And we will continue to show offers until the contract is signed. You're free to do your due diligence, come in, do your inspections, whatever. But everybody in everybody in Greenwich knows that the buyer is at risk until the contract is signed and the 10% has been delivered and it's been countersside by the seller obviously and returned. >> You told all the agents the same thing. One offer comes in, has all of that stuff.

Do you now call the other agents who showed it to let them know and see if they also want to submit or do you just present that one and if it's good? How do you deal with that? >> I think it depends. That's very often seller driven. My personal attorney, a guy by the name of Tom Ward, who unfortunately just retired but like I sent all my clients to for years and he was such a great guy. He used an expression all the time. The fastest way to know deals is two deals.

So, when people wanted to get really tricky and go back and forth and tell everyone, "We have an offer, we have an offer, we have an offer, you know, get your bid in." Sometimes people sent out two contracts, what is it that you're looking for? If you're going out to a party that didn't see value, that didn't walk in the door and send you an offer an hour later because they loved it. It was exactly what they were looking for, they had to have it, and they were really honest about what they could and could not do. We can pay X.

We can close quickly, but we need 45 days, not 30. We will let the seller stay there, but we need $5,000 a month against expenses. We can't do it for free. But other than that, we'll give you everything you asked for. That's a thoughtful offer. Those people those people have done their homework. They've been thoughtful about it. They've put something in front of you that is really helps the seller meet their goals.

If you especially if it's an agent who you know well, who you've worked with locally, who you've worked with before, you know they're someone who gets the deal done. Where's the value in shopping that honestly? >> Yeah. I mean, you could you could lose it by winning too and shopping >> because I win a lot of bidding wars. We win the overwhelming majority of the bidding wars we're in. We're very lucky. Our winning percentage is insane. I'm not always the highest number.

I have won a number of bidding wars where I was not the highest number. >> So, tell us about that. What do you attribute that to? >> I've encouraged sellers to work with offers where maybe it's not the highest number, but that's where disarming honesty comes in.

You turn to your seller and say, "I know that deal is offering $75,000 more dollars, but I was here the day of the showing, and they were nervous." And they pointed to every hairline crack and every single nick in the baseboard, and they started talking about the chimney and the flu. And this other offer, maybe it's a lot less. Maybe it's $100,000 less, but they're going to give you a contract tomorrow. No inspections. You should take the cleaner offer. >> Is that like standard in Greenwich or is seller agents?

>> No, I think that's just the price point. I mean, I don't >> It's the price point. It's what? Yeah. Okay. >> Our tiny, cute, darling little least expensive starter house, maybe in the not most desirable school district or with a little noise from the train tracks running behind or whatever, is like one and a half million, $2 million.

I mean, if you're a young family and you're like, "We need a nice three or fourbedroom house in a school district where we'll be happy with a nice little neighborhood." I'm not talking about some big place. I'm talking about just a nice little place to start out, build some equity, raise a family, have a really great school to go to, maybe like a street where Halloween will be really fun. If you don't have at least $2 million, it's very, very hard to live here. >> I see. >> It's hard to get in.

So, at that level, people demand service. And by the way, real estate commissions have always been a percentage game. Maybe now it's decoupled and one pays the buyer and one pays the seller, but at the end of the day, you're getting paid a percentage of the price. It as the price goes up, that number gets higher. People expect some service and they deserve it. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to ask you one more question. I want your thoughts on the industry.

You mentioned that you want you feel like the industry should raise its standards and education, all that. I want to hear about it. Sometimes I feel like I really do understand what it feels like the only honest used car salesman.

So, for a long time when I first got my real estate license and I was like, "Okay, I've been like a fancy stay-at-home housewife with my kids in private school and great house and all of that." And then like things kind of went sideways and I needed to come up with a career and I needed to do something financially to lean in to support lend some support in the household. You know, I was like I didn't like the kind of the reputation of being a real estate agent. First of all, every third person you met was a real estate agent.

And twothirds of them were like the mom whose last kid just went to boarding school and she likes decorating so she thinks it'll be fun to look at houses and maybe she can sell her friend a house. That has always fascinated me. We sell between 2 and 3 billion worth of real estate in Greenwich in a year just in Greenwich. So this is not a small this is a serious business and it is a serious responsibility and I think that the way consumers choose their agents never fails to fascinate me.

That is like they make insane decisions and the way that the industry decides who will and will not be put in the role of I find it to be disappointing. If you just, you know, if you're 18 years old and you graduated high school and you sit through a 60-hour class and you happen to have the kind of mind that's like a pretty good multiplechoice tester for completely inane, mediocre that you will never use in your life, congratulations, you're a real estate agent.

I went and took my broker's license cuz I wanted to get to that level and I had to study. I'd been in real estate for 17 years and I had to study because I kept failing in the at home test the sections about crops. >> Right. Right. Right. Right. >> I had to answer the value like if I brought the buyer and they signed the contract in May and the corn was knee high and the closing was supposed to happen in August but instead the closing happened in October so the corn had already been harvested. Who owed who a credit?

I'm like it's stunning. >> No one knows if you're discreet. No one knows anything about people skills and there's virtually nothing you learn on that test that can help you and there's no required mentorship. If you called a plumber tomorrow because your toilet was leaking, the cute young kid who jumped in his van and came to the house and fixed your toilet probably has been an apprentice for like 3 years.

You're not allowed to just say, "I'm going to take a multiple choice test without even ever demonstrating a skill and be a licensed plumber or a licensed electrician." You're not allowed to do that with very good reason. Okay. So, any new agents listening to this, what do you suggest for them? >> Get on a team. Get on a team. Find an unselfish mentor and there are not many. Recognize that your reputation is all that matters and it will never ever go away.

Sometimes people get tempted by going with the person who does the most deals or the person who's super flashy or the guy who just closed the, you know, I've got this big thing and that big thing and there's a Lamborghini parked in the pictures in front of all of my listings. But among the brokerage community, if that agent has a terrible reputation and that's where you align yourself, there's more than you just need someone who's going to be like open and honest with you who you respect.

But I also think you have to be very honest with yourself about what you can handle and what your financial needs are. Especially here, we work in a luxury business. We have,00 licensed agents in Greenwich. The most individuals who ever perform even one transaction. And by one transaction, I mean maybe one $4,000 a month rental rarely tops five or 600. So half of our licensed agents do zero. They're paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars in MLS fees and NAR fees and what to do nothing. >> It's in a seller market.

>> Yeah, but the seller markets are tough. I got my license in 2006 by the great kindness and just benevolence and beneficence of a great friend that I had who was moving to Greenwich. She took a flyer on using me and I sold her my house. That was my first transaction. It was in October of this coming year. I've subsequently sold that house again. 2007, our biggest year ever in Greenwich real estate before 21, I sold zero properties and I made $0. Now, I was doing it. I had just got my license. I was very, very part-time at that point.

I still had little kids at home. I really considered myself at that point still to be a full-time mom with a real estate license. But it wasn't that I didn't try. It was that in those hot markets like we've just had where a million people got their license because they thought it was easy money, that's when it's actually the hardest. That's when the most experienced agents really win.

And you saw that it became not the halves and have nots, but like the top producers produced even more and the sort of mediocre or new people at the bottom who in another type of market maybe did a couple of deals did nothing because you just didn't have the experience and you couldn't move quickly enough and with enough confidence to get it done. >> I don't know. I think you have to really understand that there is no set paycheck. You can lose money if you if you're the guy on the corner. People have heard me say this before.

If you're the guy on the corner in uh or woman in New York and you have your license, you've done your thing and you have the hot dog cart. Okay, you don't work for the hot dog cart CE. You bought or more likely leased or rented that hot dog cart. You have to pay for the actual hot dogs and the buns and the mustard and the So, you have to make an investment in your business and then have the confidence and the tolerance for risk to get out there, find the right street corner, and make sure all those hot dogs get sold.

That's the only way you're going to be successful. And if you don't have any hot dogs in the water bath, then there's no business to be had. And I look at real estate kind of the same way. Like, you have to spend money to make money. You have to put the right team around you. You have to be willing when you want the $15 million listing to get the really super highlevel videographer who costs three times what everybody else costs, but who's going to produce something worthy of that listing. And every once in a while, that listing won't sell.

And you'll eat that $10,000. >> Yeah. It's not as easy as it did on Bravo. It just isn't. >> No. Oh my gosh. The the one positive I'll say about all the shows because I know everybody loves to slam them. I slam them too, but I watch every single minute of every single one. It's like my most guilty pleasure. I love them all. Selling London, what I don't care what it is all it's it's ridiculous and fake and we all know it's not real.

Anyone in real estate, but one thing that it has done that I appreciate is that I think it has shed a light on the capacity of the industry. If you like no one ever came out of college 20 years ago and said, "You know what I want to do, mom and dad? I want to be a residential real estate agent." No one in the history of the world. What happened was your husband lost his job. You got divorced. There was some sort of financial reversal, some sort of tragedy, and you were a middle-aged woman going, "I haven't worked in 15 years.

I still have kids who need me. What can I do to contribute here?" And you got your real estate license. That's how most real estate careers used to start. Now at least now I think people recognize that's what happened for me. That's kind of how I started it. But when I was at Boutique Boutique when I came to Compass now 5 and a half years ago and the leadership was amazing and recruiting me and finally turning and saying like this is not you're running a business.

You're CEO of Julie Grace Burke Incorporated which ultimately then became C you know you're you're the CEO and founder of whatever team JGB is now and whatever it's going to be. And I think that the the shows have have made it possible for people to look and say that can be a viable not just viable but a very lucrative career. I can support an entire family and build a life. But you got to have a real tolerance for risk. I mean and it helps if you have a spouse who has health insurance. That also helps. >> Yes, of course. Yeah.

Would you share with us how your team is structured and how many people? I grabbed Liz like three years ago and was like, "You just come sit right here by me and we are going to have a ball." And that happened and I thought she'd be sort of more like at an assistant level for a couple of years and then just be selling and I would bring in the next person. Like that's what I decided to do.

I'll bring in sort of an admin assistant with the goal of them elevating to agent, not pissed off and disappointed when they want to be an agent, >> right? And then they don't leave because they have a path to advance. just was like, I'm watching everybody else do the same thing and expect a different result. I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's the definition of insanity. And I know because I worked at a mental hospital, so I was like, let's not do that. Let's try something different.

And 9 months in, Liz was selling like $18 million, $20 million. So, boom, boom, that was it. So, Liz was off to the races. And here was Craig, who I had known forever through his family and long admired, and we were friendly and in each other's space more often because I was working with one of his family members. And I was like, I think you should come work for me.

And he was like, I worked for Polo and I worked for our top jeweler and had a long career in like highle fashion, was running like a flagship store for Jay Mccclaclin or someone in New York. He had an amazing clientele and but I knew that was wearing kind of thin and retail is a tough gig. It's not fun to have to go in and make sure that, you know, everybody's ready for Black Friday. Like at at any level store, it doesn't matter. Like the times that you're busiest in retail are the times when you probably want to be least busy.

And when you're the manager and someone's sick or someone doesn't show up or someone has a death in the family, like you're filling in. That's that's your role. And I'm sure that he was the most amazing manager and every place he ever worked was devastated to lose him. But I looked at Craig and thought I don't know anyone who people enjoy being around more.

It almost gives you a complex when people are like who's I just met your and I'm like oh yeah Craig Gibson works on my team and they're like and I'm like I know I know you love Craig like everybody's like we love Craig Craig like it would almost make you start to feel bad about yourself how often tell you to your face how much they love not you cuz they love someone else. >> But Craig has this unbelievable way with people.

And Craig also has a skill set and a knowledge base in luxury goods and luxury lifestyle that I could have, I guess, but I don't care. >> It doesn't matter if you have Craig. So, >> and I also don't know anyone else who has a team member whose goal is not to sell you anything, who does not get rewarded if you do buy or you do sell or you don't. We have Craig. Craig, Liz, and I really work as a unit. You very often you get the three of us. All three come. If Liz is busy doing her own thing, that's fine.

You 99% of the time you get me. It's It's shocking Craig's not on this call. Like Craig and I are together all the time. We have very compatible but very opposite skill sets. And I knew that there was a whole piece of the business that did not have to be dependent on a license to sell, which changes how you approach things. That's so interesting >> that in a luxury business was really important for us. Yeah. Craig is the director of growth and client experience on our team.

He's the director of growth because business just comes because everybody loves Craig. So that's great. And then that business gets moved. Luckily, aren't I lucky that comes to to the team and to me? But the client experience piece is something that if you run any luxury business, you have to have. If you go to a Hampton Inn because your kids's in a hockey tournament, they don't have a concierge. But if you go to Four Seasons, you have a concierge.

You know, Craig does all the things that make your experience easier and better that you would expect at a luxury level. And in Greenwich, every single piece of real estate we sell or rent is luxury. Every single one. We had clients in February who wanted to sell and we sold their house, but because of a just a glitch in the calendar, they had already moved. So, they moved. They We managed a lot of their move. We sold their house and now the rest of the move had to be managed. Well, they forgot like 2,000 bottles of wine in the wine celler.

There was some significant art, whatever. And it's not the best use of my time. And that's where Craig I wouldn't know those things. Craig moves in those circles more naturally than I do. He knew how to get 2,000 bottles of wine moved and R transport it. >> Well, of course.

I'm going to call this guy and they're going to come and we're going to put this much wine in a refrigerated truck and send it to you at your new house in Austin and we're going to put this in the special wine storage facility that everybody rents space in at XYZ and we're going to create a grandma chandelier and we're going to have the auction house come get these four things. That's just a service. They're not getting charged for it. I'm getting charged for it.

But ultimately, I know it's probably not popular to say also, but like when you operate in the realm that we operate in, you make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money and people pay you a lot for the service. So, if all you're doing is throwing it on the MLS and taking a few pictures, shame on you. Or worse, shame on your client for not demanding more. I mean, this always fascinates me. As I said before, Sean Kungler's big line all the time, I would never cut my own hair. He's the one who says it. I stole that from him.

But like, I don't cut my own hair. My hair is extremely expensive. People get into real estate for all different reasons. They're not always happy and they're not always without stress. But I do think you owe it to yourself and your clients to educate yourself. I think a new agent should get on a team or link up with someone who's willing to mentor them whether they are new at 25 or new at 55. They have a lot to learn.

But people out of the goodness of their heart, and they really are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, look at their friend who sadly had some financial reversals or just got divorced or something happened and they decided to go out and get their real estate license and maybe they've done like one rental and you decide to sell your house and this is like your closest best friend and so they give that friend their listing. They don't even insist that they co-list with, you know, someone super experienced.

They just give the listing to the new person and it comes from a good place. But it also shows me that you don't actually understand or respect what we do professionally. Because if you bought your house precoid for $2 million and put down 50% and now that's doubled in value and you're going to sell your house for $4 million, there's $3 million in in equity waiting to be unlocked. Okay?

If that $3 million was $100 bills stacked up in a wheelbarrow and that same friend had just graduated from wealth advisor school, you probably wouldn't wheel them over all of your money and say, "Please take care of that." And if your nephew, who you love and adore and would always support, just pass the medical boards yesterday, you probably wouldn't be like, you know, I need that hip replacement. Go for it. You wouldn't. >> You're right. You're right. I think if people thought about your home is where your kids were born.

It's where you fell in love. It's where you fell out of love. It's like lots of things happened. It's where your parent died in the bed and you watched them. And they're so they're filled with our lives. And so they are emotional vessels. And I do understand that. My job is to not lose respect for that, but never lose sight of the fact that at what I am ultimately is a fiduciary and what that is is a financial instrument. And I want to guard that for you.

and I want to get you every single penny that I can in the manner in which you'd like it in the time frame that matters to you under the circumstances that matter to you. It doesn't always mean it's the top dollar, but most of the time it is and that's really what your job is. >> Julie, it is no mystery why you were so successful. Would hire you myself and I now want to go. >> You're very kind. >> Now I want to go move to Greenwich also. I at least want to come visit. >> Come be on my team. We'd have so much fun.

>> I would I mean yeah great. And I want to know, so uh, can you please tell everybody, anybody who needs any help in Greenwich how to find you? >> Well, team jgb.com, Julie Grace Burke, I work with Compass. Look for the orange. You'll always find it. Yeah, I'm pretty easy to spot in the wilderness, I will say. Come to Greenwich. I only do Greenwich. I do Greenwich Old Riverside Costco. Liz on my team will do a little bit of Derenne and New Kanan, mostly with buyers. We We don't do a ton of listings outside of our immediate area.

Uh, we understand you have to go 10 miles deep here. That's what clients expect if you're going to give the right kind of service. And if you're going to know everything about a town that has like literally our public school system has like 15 schools in it. I mean, tons of elementary schools, three middle schools, a huge high school, there's enough to know just here. That agent who you call for Greenwich and they're like, "Oh, yes. I also do Westport and I do Westchester and I do whatever." Call someone else. >> Excellent.

Julie, thank you so much for being here with us. This was great. I really enjoyed it. >> If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who would find value in it. For more conversations on leadership, business, real estate, and building what's next, follow along and connect with us online. Until next time, keep raising your standards and keep owning your next chapter.