Though she won awards for her films and earned a graduate degree in moviemaking at Columbia University, Julie Pham left the director’s chair to become a real estate broker. She still feels glamorous, and with good reason.
Pham, who works out of the Corcoran Group’s Soho office, just won the equivalent of an Oscar in her new field. She recently received REBNY’s prestigious award for most promising rookie residential salesperson of the year after signing and closing sales of $25 million.
“Real estate in New York has become what movies are to Hollywood,” she said. “It’s exciting because you’re always in the game and not just sitting on the sidelines.”
“It’s a lot of pressure for 2007,” she said of the award.
Judges also considered nominees’ dealmaking ability, leadership skills and teamwork, among other qualities, said Jeanne Oliver-Taylor, vice president of brokerage services and education at REBNY. Supporting documentation was limited to a one-page description of the ways in which the applicant met the criteria. Although Pham’s only been an agent since 2005, her career total of 17 deals and transactions worth a total of $25 million in sales landed her the award.
Her rapid ascent through the ruthless city real estate market bears little relation to her roots in Tulsa, Okla. Pham’s father, a refugee from Vietnam, settled there, hoping to capitalize on his experience in the oil industry. He eventually established his own business selling air compressors, but it was a difficult transition.
“I was born over someone’s garage, my parents were on welfare for a few years,” she said. “My mother worked three jobs and put herself through school to become an electrical engineer while learning English.”
Pham, who speaks no Vietnamese, became enamored with New York City at age 17, when she visited during a family vacation. “It was a culture shock, but I knew that the hyperkinetic dynamism fit my personality,” she said.
After attending the University of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate, she studied English for a year at Oxford University as a Ford Fellow. She also excelled at classical piano, a skill that has since lapsed. Despite receiving a prestigious fellowship to study at Columbia and showing her short independent films at several well-known festivals, including the New Orleans Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, she ditched it all for real estate.
Her first month as a broker, she rolled the dice and bought an apartment in Midtown with money borrowed from her parents. “I was like a black sheep in my family for pursuing the arts,” she said. “But after I got into real estate, I did get to repay my parents for lending me the money for my first apartment.”
But for Pham, the reward for her astute move has roots in heartbreak. “I was dating a hedge fund manager and almost overnight he raised $1 billion, so we moved from our $2,000-a-month rental into a $15,000-a-month apartment,” she said, recalling their three-bedroom duplex penthouse in Chelsea. “I was fascinated with the execution and the transaction. Even after the lease was signed, I kept looking at listings online. Everyone said, ‘You moved in already. What are you doing?’ The process just hooked me.”
A week later, while she was unpacking the silverware, he told her that he wanted to see other people. “I was fresh out of grad school, broke and in debt,” she said. “I thought for a good three months about my true obsession — and it wasn’t film.”
Yet some filmmaking skills transferred. “The psychology of the transaction felt like casting in films, which was always my favorite part — figuring out quickly who should go where, picking up on personalities and matching them,” she said.
She also tried acting. The hot market encouraged her to apply at the top agencies, but a handful of standard interviews across a desk merely highlighted her inexperience.
Then her resume ended up in the hands of Janet Lowry, a senior managing director at Corcoran. With one desk to fill and three quality applicants, she put them through an “Apprentice”-like regimen: in addition to requiring a business plan, she also sent Pham undercover to critique an open house.
“She gave me two pages that considered every detail from the lighting to the furniture,” said Lowry. “That’s when I knew she had the qualities that I’m looking for. I can tell when someone’s got ‘it,’ the X-factor. She’s tenacious and really knows her product. If I ask her about any developments in the city, she knows the market cold. She’s gifted at what she does and strives for excellence.”
Pham’s first sale took shape at a dinner party. A mortgage banker began talking about what he was looking for in an apartment, including his desire to have a hot tub in his master bedroom. “He became my target,” she said. “I asked ‘how about a hot tub on your terrace?’ since I knew of a place with one.”
He took the second place she showed him, a two-bedroom penthouse for $1.55 million at 350 West 53rd Street. The buyer has since knocked down a wall to create a large one-bedroom.
An artist who created a gallery out of his two-bedroom apartment in the Steiner Building at 257 West 17th Street was her toughest sale, she said. “It was really a wreck and he wouldn’t clean out any of the clutter, so I was tripping over Buddha statues while showing this apartment,” she said. “No one could envision the space. It demanded a visionary buyer. People could see that it had high ceilings and it was a nice prewar building, but I showed it many, many times before I got an offer for $1.2 million.”
Still hobnobbing with the hedge fund crowd, Pham, 30, likes to vacation in chic St. Bart’s and is cultivating a specialty in destination clubs, which offer members access to white-glove properties around the globe for use as second homes without the hassle of ownership.
In New York City, such properties are rare, though some clubs are scouting buildings to convert and possible construction sites. Pham has sold two properties in a building that she wants to keep secret. “It comes down to zoning, knowing what is allowed in the offering plan and the sponsor’s proclivities,” she said. “Putting that all together can be mind-boggling.”