Julia Spillman and the business between the stars

Luxury real estate has plenty of photographs of people standing in front of expensive windows. Julia Spillman’s story contains a more useful photograph: a young agent posing with Fredrik Eklund because her husband liked him on television. John Gomes took the picture. Years later, the three would be running a national real estate business together. At the time, she just wanted something to show her husband.

The small joke inside that origin story is that Spillman already knew how to make herself useful. She had been working on downtown Manhattan condo conversions, learning a part of the business that offered considerably more work than glamour. She kept in touch. She learned the projects. When an opportunity finally arrived, she brought something that her future partners needed: an appetite for the machinery behind the sale.

Eklund and Gomes had the relationships, the recognition and the marketing instincts. Spillman liked processes and databases. A partnership began to take shape around that difference. In a business where everyone has a listing presentation, she was interested in what happened after the presentation was put away.

A caution light, then a much bigger city

Spillman grew up in a small Kentucky town whose traffic infrastructure, as she tells it, amounted to a caution light. Her father, an engineer, encouraged her business ambitions. She spent school breaks traveling with him and wanted to follow his example. The city dreams came early; the professional route took a few turns.

She attended Western Kentucky University from 2001 to 2005. Her first career was residential lending, including work at HSBC and Merrill Lynch. Six years in that field gave her an education in the less photogenic side of buying property: financing, portfolios and the many dependencies inside a transaction. A home purchase could be exciting and intricate at once. She had worked where those two conditions met.

Her move into New York real estate meant learning a different job. She worked with the Ariel Cohen Team at Douglas Elliman, helping buyers, sellers and renters. Market analysis, pricing and guiding clients through a transaction were part of the work. Before she would oversee agents across several markets, she had to become useful to the person trying to find an apartment in one.

That grounding matters to her later career. A lender sees a purchase through the buyer’s finances. An agent sees it through the search, the negotiation and the close. Spillman accumulated both perspectives. Running a team would eventually require her to think about all the people involved, including the ones whose work rarely earns a photograph.

The job hidden inside the job

In 2016, Spillman joined Eklund and Gomes as sales director for 1 Seaport, a 98-unit Manhattan condominium project. She began examining their project database. Years of work had left them with information about buyers and clients who might be ready for another purchase. The material existed. The opportunity was to organize it and use it with some intention.

Her banking background supplied practical connections as well as financial knowledge. She brought in developers and consultants to create a custom customer relationship management system. The database could support the resale agents as well as individual new-development campaigns. A relationship established during one project could continue into the next transaction.

By 2017 she was the team’s first CEO. Daily operations, budgets and hiring became her responsibility, along with helping prepare the expansion into Los Angeles and Miami. The title followed a widening job. There is something satisfyingly unromantic about the sequence: first make the information usable, then take on the business that needs to use it.

Giving a growing business somewhere to go

The dates tell only part of the story. By March 2025, when Eklund and Gomes marked 20 years of partnership, Douglas Elliman credited Spillman with leading expansion, recruitment and marketing strategy. The acknowledgement put her work inside the history of the team itself. COO Suzie Guardino was also recognized. An operation of this size has more moving parts than the names on the door suggest.

The team had already made a consequential decision in December 2022: it renewed its arrangement with Douglas Elliman. Its announcement described 90 people operating across 13 markets, with more than $4 billion in transactions that year to that point. It also counted more than 80 new developments sold. Those numbers describe a considerable coordination problem as well as a sales business.

Spillman’s explanation for staying emphasized the brokerage’s support for teams. There was a practical fit between a group expanding across markets and an existing firm able to accommodate it. The arrangement gave the three leaders a way to keep building inside a larger organization. Independence, in their case, did not require an entirely new sign over the entrance.

New development remained central. Among the assignments announced in late 2022 was national and international marketing for the forthcoming Four Seasons Private Residences Lake Austin, alongside Douglas Elliman Development Marketing. It was the kind of work that needed the partners’ combined abilities: a compelling presentation, relationships with developers and buyers, and a system for carrying the interest forward.

Billions, with the arithmetic left in

Large sales figures can make a business sound strangely frictionless. The team’s reported results tell a more interesting story when the years remain attached. It closed $4.5 billion in sales in 2021 and $4.6 billion in 2022. In 2023, the figure was $3.77 billion. Even a business operating at this scale experiences a slower year.

Spillman had another measure worth mentioning: 13 agents had better years in 2023 than in 2022. Around 25 earned more than $1 million in commissions. The collective result had declined, while some individuals advanced. For someone responsible for building a team, both facts belong in the same conversation.

The national footprint gave the group several places to work when demand varied. Florida could offer activity while another market slowed. Its agents also covered different price points and rentals. Geographic expansion had taken money, resources and effort. The benefit was a business with more than one route to a transaction.

By May 2024, Spillman described approximately 100 agents across five states and 13 offices. Her preferred image for the organization was a constellation. Individual agents could develop their own standing while contributing to the visibility of the whole. It is an appealing image for a profession with an unusually generous supply of aspiring stars.

“We are a constellation.”

Julia Spillman, May 2024

There is a demanding management proposition inside that image. A national name has to mean something to an agent who knows a particular neighborhood. And local knowledge has to remain valuable inside the larger group. Spillman’s version makes the individual’s progress part of the collective ambition. Recruiting people is only the beginning of that arrangement.

It also gives a fuller meaning to her CEO title. The job connects decisions about markets with decisions about people: where to put resources, how to share knowledge and which responsibilities belong to whom. A larger map creates more opportunities for a team, along with more places for a handoff to go wrong. Someone has to keep track of both.

The calendar gets a vote

Her preferences make the operational role easier to picture. Asked which app she could not live without, Spillman picked her calendar. Asked for advice that had stayed with her, she offered this: “You need to be able to manage up as well as you manage down.” Anyone who has tried to organize an ambitious colleague may recognize the distinction immediately.

Social media has given her a different kind of access. A woman named Jackie contacted her online, became someone she mentored and eventually ran marketing for the Florida team. Spillman described the connection as an example of how telling her own business story could help future colleagues find her. The public profile could do some useful recruiting work.

She has also made time for fundraising. Her professional biography records service with the New York City Junior League and Big Brothers Big Sisters, along with involvement in American Ballet Theatre’s Junior Council and its 2014 Spring Gala. Her relationships have extended beyond the next property transaction.

When the system needs simplifying

By September 2026, Spillman was still discussing the operational details. In a conversation with David Siddons, she described the lesson of a heavily customized CRM that became too complicated for the team to use. More features had created an adoption problem. The response was to simplify the system around actions agents would actually perform.

That admission adds texture to the database success story. Building the machinery once does not finish the job. A tool can become cumbersome. Habits need reinforcement. The people entering information have to see a reason to keep entering it. Even the executive associated with bringing order to a business has had to reconsider how much order a piece of software should attempt.

The work comes back to follow-up, clear responsibilities and repeated actions. Those details have accompanied her from a project sales role into a national organization. Her career offers an unusually concrete picture of what an operator contributes: deciding how interest becomes a relationship, who takes responsibility for it, and how the next person can pick up the conversation.

The early photograph has acquired a different meaning with time. Gomes was behind the camera; Spillman and Eklund were in front of it. Eventually, all three found their places in the business. A picture requested for her husband became a small souvenir of the period before anyone knew how much they would do together.