From Flips to Relocation: Julie Vanderblue’s Secrets to Real Estate Success

Julie Vanderblue (00:00)
one of the things we

started doing was exclusive sneak preview division. This is really what launched my career and when I bought my house it was not for sale. was for sale, was just not on the market. It had a for sale sign. I literally pulled the for sale sign out of the ground, walked up to the front door and said what do you want for this property? And I said I’m going to put it back but I’m showing you all my cards. I really want your house. it told me what it was, the price, and she walked me through it and she said I’m going to do, we’re going

do this floor, going to paint, we’re going to, I’m like do nothing. Spend zero dollars and I’m going to give you ASCII price. I just don’t want you to put it on the market. You can put it on the market as binder but, we’ll the contract before we do. And I remembered that fear of loss and I remembered how I felt and I would have done anything and I probably overpaid a little bit with absolutely zero regret. And I was talking to my husband and I’m like wow.

Dylan Silver (00:36)
Yeah.

Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest leads a 37 agent team in Fairfield County, Connecticut that sells more homes than any other team in the area. And she’s been in real estate for over 30 years, licensed in Connecticut, New York and Florida, specializes in relocation, new construction, builder relationships, does high volume of flips and has an in-house staging company. Please welcome Julie Vanderblue. Julie, welcome to the show.

Julie Vanderblue (02:49)
Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me, Dylan. It’s a privilege to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:53)
It’s great to have you on here, Julie. I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Julie Vanderblue (03:00)
Yeah.

Well, I was not someone that was looking to become a Realtor. In fact, I saw it as a greed-infested industry. It took me almost a year to admit I was a Realtor when I was just out amongst my friends because if you read many books, Realtors are below used car salesmen or they’re just the reputation of Realtors was not something that attracted me. I’m very entrepreneurial. I started a couple of businesses college and after college and my background is marketing. So I was working in a company. was with Gannett for

Dylan Silver (03:12)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (03:29)
I’m working as a marketing strategist for businesses, helping businesses grow. So my husband was a builder and I was not at all impressed with the marketing that was being done for him. So my initial plan was just to get my license and market his properties. But as an opportunity junkie a little bit, I saw this broken industry and thought I can make some changes. so, and that happened because I got busy very, very quickly.

because of the marketing strategy I had for my husband’s homes. And people would come to my open houses and, oh my God, can you sell my house? So before, very, very quickly, I had more listings than I even wanted. And that’s when I decided, okay, I’m gonna create a plan. back in my day, I don’t even know if they teach SWOT analysis anymore, I would do SWOT Exactly. So I would do the SWOT analysis for each home, and we had a whole strategy.

Dylan Silver (04:14)
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Julie Vanderblue (04:22)
it but decided I didn’t want to I joined a team actually originally I didn’t want I wasn’t planning on starting a team but teams were very very new then it was almost there wasn’t many and I joined one and I kind of learned what not to do like I stayed for a year and I realized I want to do things completely differently so I started my own team only two years after being in the business and and we’ve been

Dylan Silver (04:37)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (04:48)
at the top of the market, number one in our industry ever since. We just work really hard, we’re very consumer-centric, but that’s how I got in. It wasn’t a planned, I didn’t grow up wanting to be a rail tourer, but the opportunity was there that I’m attracted to growth. Anything that can grow and you can make better is something that attracts me.

Dylan Silver (05:56)
Did you have other than your husband, did you have family, friends, relatives that were realtors or investors prior to you becoming a realtor?

Julie Vanderblue (06:04)
Nope. No one was in the real estate industry.

Dylan Silver (06:07)
So you’re the type, and I

was the same way, you’re the type of person who when you see an opportunity, even if it’s a little bit foreign, you say, hey, let me see, let’s see what I can do here, because I’m seeing realtors come in trying to sell the builds, you know, and it’s not where I want it to be, and I think I can do a better job. What was your strategy like? Take us back to that first year, two years, and what was your strategy that you were doing with your husband’s builds that you found was?

big difference and even other people are saying, hey, can you list my home?

Julie Vanderblue (06:39)
Yeah, I mean back then it was basically an MLS sheet on the table. That was the marketing. And I think emotional buyers, I wanted to create emotional buyers so we created storybooks, lifestyle stories of the home and the top 10 things that you’ll love about, I can show you, I’ll send you an example, but it’s a story of the home. So it’s a book. You want to create an emotional body. And the top 10 things isn’t just

Dylan Silver (07:02)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (07:05)
and Zillow actually, John Buller, I don’t want to say they copied my idea, but I brought the top 10 things that people will love about the property to create an emotional buyer. part of that was my whole strategy around that was when I began that was my husband built a house that had a house in the backyard because it was a flag lot when they allowed that here. So I knew one of the things that was going to be an objection was the houses in the

Dylan Silver (07:08)
Hahaha

Julie Vanderblue (07:29)
and it was on a very busy road. part of the top 10 was to turn negatives into positives and create emotion that way. So one of them was I would miss my neighbors and how much I loved being, or how much we loved having our neighbors so close to us if I wanted to borrow a cup of sugar at 10 o’clock and didn’t want to go to the store, they were right there and they kept an eye on our house. Or the busy road was letting the kids ride their bikes like big boys and girls all the way to school.

I’m selling.

authentically, like we don’t sell, educate, we do authenticity sells. There’s an article about me that they call the authenticity sells and it really spoke to me because if people feel sold, they’re going to resist. If they feel spoken to, they’re going to not even know that they’re leaning in. We want people to lean in and you can see it. People are either like this or they’re like this. And so between the top 10, the interview with the owner, the flip book story,

Dylan Silver (07:58)
Yeah.

They’re gonna push back.

Julie Vanderblue (08:26)
book, what’s happening in the neighborhood, the map that shows exactly where the property is so that when they go home with six MLS sheets and one storybook that shows exactly, because if you’re looking at six houses in a day, you don’t remember where it is. But if you look at where it is, you see what the neighboring houses are going for. So we not only were marketing, we were influencing the decision of buyers. And that’s where I think most people stop, like they’ll sell.

Dylan Silver (08:38)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (08:51)
But they don’t have the influence that we have because they were going home with something that was influential, not just factual. If that makes sense to you.

Dylan Silver (08:59)
Absolutely. You know, I want

to ask you about being in the business for a full cycle. I’ve heard this term before. A full cycle is 25 years and seeing so many ups and downs and so many different strategies for marketing properties and seeing technology come and go and now AI and you’ve had to adapt and you’re in so many different verticals with the new builds, flips. You have your own staging company, right?

Julie Vanderblue (09:17)
Thank

Dylan Silver (09:24)
Along the way, did you realize, hey, the strategies that we have here, we’ve got to pivot this. And what were some of those pivot points along the way?

Julie Vanderblue (09:32)
you know…

I get bored easily so there’s nothing more attractive to me than a changing market because that means opportunity. And when something where everybody’s freaking out it’s like, yes, run to the pivot because there’s so many ways to help people when they’re, it means that people need help and that’s what we do. We help people. So pivoting, you know, so many pivots with the crash, you know, now if a house doesn’t sell in a week, people are like freaking out and educate them that

Dylan Silver (09:41)
Yeah.

They are, ⁓

Julie Vanderblue (09:59)
The norm, if you look at the norm, 45 to 60 days was the average market price in an even a mediocre, in a good market. In a not so great market, it was 150 days. So pricing strategies of talking, there’s three pricing strategies below market value to create a real multiple offer situation right around where you’re end up, but with a little flexibility, and then retail. And

Dylan Silver (10:06)
Yeah.

That’s right.

Urgence thing, yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (10:59)
one of the things we

started doing was exclusive sneak preview division. This is really what launched my career and when I bought my house it was not for sale. was for sale, was just not on the market. It had a for sale sign. I literally pulled the for sale sign out of the ground, walked up to the front door and said what do you want for this property? And I said I’m going to put it back but I’m showing you all my cards. I really want your house. it told me what it was, the price, and she walked me through it and she said I’m going to do, we’re going

do this floor, going to paint, we’re going to, I’m like do nothing. Spend zero dollars and I’m going to give you ASCII price. I just don’t want you to put it on the market. You can put it on the market as binder but, we’ll the contract before we do. And I remembered that fear of loss and I remembered how I felt and I would have done anything and I probably overpaid a little bit with absolutely zero regret. And I was talking to my husband and I’m like wow.

Dylan Silver (11:36)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (11:50)
How can I create that in other people, not to be a fear monger, but to really help our sellers get what they’re looking for? And so we created exclusive sneak preview division, which was off market opportunities, they weren’t pocket listings because we had a whole strategy on every single one of our properties went into our ESP division before it came on the market. So we had a constant flow to the public. And this is no bash on Compass, but Compass kind of keeps their

This is a whole controversial subject if you know about NAR and Compass and MLSs and keeping hidden listings. Ours were not hidden. This was a true strategy to test the market. It was a marketing research time. When you think about it, most companies have a marketing research company. This was the time that we did market research and we found the pre-marketing pricing so that when we came live,

Dylan Silver (12:25)
Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (12:45)
could price appropriately or potentially drive a buyer to pay a premium to not lose the house. So that was the strategy we employed early on and we then MLS changed its rules so you know I’m we’ve shifted and pivoted so many times that’s my favorite part about it because we Alan Dalton are you familiar with Alan Dalton he was the CEO he was CEO

Dylan Silver (13:04)
You have to.

I’m not, I’m not.

Julie Vanderblue (13:10)
video of realtor.com and works with Berkshire Hathaway, very influential, had a hundred offices in New Jersey and in California. Well in California I worked for realtor.com. Anyway, was on a speaking engagement, met him and I’ve sold him three houses. He’s a client now, I have his house on the market, brilliant guy, but I just remember this one statement so clearly early in the game that he said, what’s really important is not, what are you doing best?

better than anybody else. Like that’s, what are you doing better? But more importantly, what are you doing that nobody else is doing? And that so resonated with me and so I recognized in myself that I’m always seeing what can be done that nobody’s doing. And when you have a pivot, when you have a changing market, it’s easy to be first to the table for someone that thinks that way. It’s easy to be more of a trendsetter if you’re thinking about in advance, what are we doing that nobody’s doing yet?

Dylan Silver (13:50)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (14:03)
So I embrace change and I don’t want people to be afraid. I want them to recognize that there’s a solution no matter what it is and they just need someone that thinks forward and creatively. And that’s what we do.

Dylan Silver (14:16)
People want to work with

these creative situations. is sneak peek. I love that idea. And I understand that there could be some, you know, differing opinions. But I think it’s I come from that world. I come from the pocket listing, the off market, the, you creative finance and all of all of the other than traditional real estate is what I came from.

And so when I hear folks like yourself who are involved in not just that but also so many different areas, I think that’s exactly the strategy that you need to win. Because if I’m thinking about listing my home and I don’t know any of these people personally, right, and I’m thinking I don’t have much real estate experience and I have all these memories in this home and I don’t want to trust this and then have the process go wrong. I’ve heard other

Julie Vanderblue (14:41)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:08)
not so good stories and maybe there’s even an emotional toll or anxiety or stress associated with it.

I want to go with the person that is going to be the most cutting edge that’s going to be doing things a little bit differently so that I can not just be happy about selling my home but like proud of the process so other people can say hey I see what you’re doing with this that’s really interesting who did you go with and to your credit you know that’s how people have found you they’ve seen like hey

Julie Vanderblue (16:01)
you

Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:16)
Julie and her team have done this amazing job with other people’s homes, doing things that we haven’t seen done before or that I’m not familiar with. How do I get in contact with Julie to list my home that way? And I think that’s incredible. And I think now with AI, we have a lot of guests, Julie, talk about AI on this show. It’s even more, I’d say pertinent and important for people to embrace new strategies because

it doesn’t take as much effort as it previously did to kind of see an idea to fruition when you can have machines writing it out for you and turning your creativity into reality. Before we wrap here though, Julie, I do want to ask you about the investing side of the business. I know you’re involved in flips, new construction, you have builder relationships, and this is something that I’m very passionate about and I’d say is niche within the

realtor world. Your husband is a builder so there’s some synergy there but working as a realtor but also

Julie Vanderblue (17:12)
He’s not

really building anywhere, just full disclosure, we bought it in in Maine, so he’s building up there, but that’s what got me into it.

Dylan Silver (17:20)
into the business. Background, But

the investing world tied into the real estate world. I want to get your perspective on that broad strokes. What’s it like being a realtor tied in with the investor world as well?

Julie Vanderblue (17:39)
it’s… a more…

Exciting for me as far as like I really enjoy finding opportunities for our builders and it depends We’ve got a builder. We’ve got a lot of investors that want to hold properties We’ve got a lot of investors that just want to flip we’ve got a lot of investors that think they’re investors And they don’t know what they’re doing. We’ve got subcontractors people people that mean they just have the money so we have subcontractors and that that my husband’s background helps because I’ve got access to builders and people who can like if you had money and you want

Dylan Silver (17:56)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (18:10)
to flip a house I could help you even though you have no clue so the first thing is onboarding and we get a real sense of knowledge of the investors skill sets financial situation how much they want to be involved because every for a while there everybody wanted to be investor ⁓ there’s no inventory you know I’m gonna make money in real estate and so it’s whether they want you know we can talk about cap rates if they’re gonna hold we want to do how big do you want your portfolio to be do you just want to flip houses do you want to do a

Dylan Silver (18:25)
Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (18:37)
do you want partnerships, do you… So there’s so many little nuances to the investment division that people don’t understand that I think half of the people we win over is because we ask the right questions and we listen. So I think most people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can help you, I can help you, I can help you, like a little puppy. we don’t work with everybody. We interview you and we decide if we think we can find you what you’re looking for realistically because the last thing we want to do is waste

your time or have you feel like you can do something that’s really not going to work out for you when you’re going to end up losing money. So let’s sit down and have an hour consultation about investment, what your goals are, and then they really have a discovery survey that they fill out to really, and I say, listen, this is just as much for you as me because I want to know what you’re doing, but this is going to make you pause for thought about what you really want because there’s a lot of things that you can be doing. let’s start.

Dylan Silver (19:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Julie Vanderblue (19:30)
People try to run before they walk. So we crawl for just five minutes and we start to walk. And then we say, okay, and that’s why we’ve got a success rate because so many times you waste a lot of time with someone who thinks they want to do what they want to do. And then when they realize it, they don’t and they can’t. so whether it’s a flipper and I love the flips. mean, I love a quick flip because I love, I love, I love being able to see a young person or an older person get into a home that they can afford that’s newer.

Dylan Silver (19:32)
That’s right. Flips are not easy.

Julie Vanderblue (19:58)
And when I bought it was all about a fixer-upper. My first house I still remember doing my dishes in my shower because the kitchen was totally like demolished. I’m peeling wallpaper. We did it all ourselves. Today’s not that way. Young people, old people don’t want to even paint. Like you walk in and that’s the first thing we do when we have a house to sell. We talk about painting. It’s the easiest thing to do to freshen it up, but if we can spend

Dylan Silver (20:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Julie Vanderblue (20:25)
if we can get an investor who wants to flip houses, I could find them houses opportunities all day. Because there’s so many types of houses out there that aren’t selling that can become little cream puffs.

Dylan Silver (20:32)
It’s.

Yeah, I mean that’s right. mean, being a flipper

is great when it’s great and it’s tough when it’s tough, It’s all fun and games to be a flipper until you pull up the subfloor and there’s a crack in the foundation. And I’ve been there, I’ve seen it.

Julie Vanderblue (20:49)
Yeah.

And that’s a really good point I want to jump on because because we’ve got the background of construction and knowledge of foundation and we know what to walk away from. I walk away from more than I, more than we make offers on. Where a lot of realtors are like, yeah, this can be beautiful. It’s not the cost of the foundation and it’s, is that, you know, there’s a cesspool. All right.

Dylan Silver (21:08)
Great,

Julie Vanderblue (21:14)
Is there room for a septic? And obviously those are the obvious questions, but as you know, there’s a lot of little things that can go wrong that you can uncover before you put the offering.

Dylan Silver (21:25)
And I think, you know, being a realtor in that space, it’s not, it’s interesting to hear your perspective because you’re right. mean, effectively, a lot of people might look at it. Well, like my job ends when this person buys his property, but then if they don’t make any money on it, they’re not coming back to you. They’re not sending you anybody else. might say negative things. And then certainly if they go to sell it, they’re not coming back to you. So there’s definitely ⁓ a different kind of eye and thought process and knowledge base.

in the investing ⁓ part of it. we are coming up on time here, Julie. Where can folks go if they’d maybe like to reach out to you if they’re in the Connecticut, ⁓ New York or Florida area and specifically Connecticut, right? And are thinking about relocating.

Julie Vanderblue (22:07)
Well, our website is vanderblue.com.

just like it sounds, Vander Blue color. I can say my office number is 203-259-8326 which is 203-2519 if that’s easier to remember. People don’t do that anymore like they used to. So basically my website, our Instagram, it’s just the Vander Blue team. They can find us anywhere. I also want to point out the relocation part of it. I want to speak to a

realtor’s for a second of any realtor’s besides buyers and sellers and investors because who you put your clients

the hands you put your clients into is so important. And most people just go on realtor.com and look and yeah, that guy’s got a lot of reviews and they send them their clients. If you’ve got anybody in those areas, I’m always looking, we do a lot of re-load and I’m looking for like-minded thinkers who are consumer-centric, really believe in education versus sales, who really work hard for their clients so that we can refer outside of Connecticut because everybody we sell to is moving

And we’ve got we’ve gotten a great we’re part of Forbes, so I’ve got a relocation network however, it’s the relationship that matters, and I think that’s what sets us aside with with our buyers and sellers as well I Highly advise any realtor to take the time Up front take the extra time upfront to create that relationship instead of just get the listing and the same goes with realtor’s relationships So I am looking to create new relationships with realtor

Dylan Silver (23:07)
It’s rain.

Julie Vanderblue (23:33)
and would love for real tourists to reach out as well as buyers and sellers of course.

Dylan Silver (23:39)
Julie,

thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Julie Vanderblue (23:42)
it’s my pleasure. It great to meet you.