KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Broke To Millionaire In Real Estate Agent with Scott Bautista

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Welcome to the Gold Bar podcast, where we speak with some of the most successful real estate agents, investors, and business professionals in the world. My name is Juan Carlos Varanetti, and I was able to build my real estate business to the point where it makes me more than half a million dollars a year working 100% virtually from home. If your goal is to close more deals and build a real estate business that brings you wealth, happiness, and peace, then this podcast is for you. And welcome back to another episode of the Gold Bar Barrow. our podcast. I'm your host on Carl's Baranetti and on today's show. We have a very special guest and I know I always say that, but this time I really meet it. Scott Battista of the Batista Twins real estate team. He's based out of Seattle. Sold a quarter billion dollars worth of real estate last year alone. Man, that is too much real estate. Scott, how you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Super excited to be on this podcast with you. We've been friends for a while now. We're both at the same company. And the first thing that caught my eye when I first came across your Instagram, this was like before we even started talking and before we, I think before you joined our company as well, was that your brand was just so on point. Like everything you were doing was so memorable, whether it was like the way you, you wore these three piece suits, the cars, the luxury properties. It was almost like you custom tailored your entire brand so that people knew exactly who you were as soon as you stepped onto the scene. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about your brand. Let's talk about how you came up with it.

And let's talk about where you want to take it. Yeah. So how I came up with this brand is I had my brother actually, he wasn't even in the real estate business yet. And we had this idea back in 2006 where he was supposed to get licensed with me. And that's the year I got licensed. We took the classes together and everything. But he decided not to go through with it.

No kidding. Yeah, he decided not to go through with it. 10 years later, fast forward, he got burnt out in the car business. And I was like, Sean, you should have joined me 10 years ago. And we started to build the brand, Bautista Twins, in 2016. Now, when designing the brand, did you guys get together one day, like, over lunch and like, hey, like, I want our brand to look like this. I want everyone to have like an outside perspective of like when they see our content,

they're going to think this or was it just something that happened naturally? No, we did, we did plan this whole whole. thing. We wanted to represent ourselves with the highest class possible online in person. Wherever we went, I mean, I'm not wearing a suit right now, but yes, we did plan it. Cool. And now, like I said, it's obviously working because you're getting a lot of luxury listings. You have the recognition. You're working with a lot of influencers and people that are buying these multimillion dollar homes. What's it like being in luxury real estate, especially at a point in time where so many people want to get into it?

What's it like? What it's like to be in luxury real estate? It's an experience that you give your clients. It's almost the same as selling a $300,000 house, but it's this level of service that we're giving to our clients every day. So the exact process really hasn't changed from selling a lower price home to a higher price home. It's more so the expectation that the client is expecting. Yeah, I would say so for sure.

It's just what they're looking for and what they're needing. are cool cool and then when it comes to luxury real estate are do you offer any additional services that you wouldn't offer normally maybe on a lower price listing we do we offer free staging on our listings we do our videos as well for free it's all included with our 6% commission so perfect and then when when you go ahead and you uh you took on a client for whatever reason let's say the property doesn't sell do you eat those costs yeah sometimes yeah we do for the most part we eat those costs if it does not so does the client reimburse you or no they don't we have to eat it up wow so that's just like the cost of doing business yeah it is that's crazy so so so what would

be your advice for someone that wants to get started but can't offer those services out of pocket just because purely they don't have money it would be to team up with somebody that's doing it already reach out and that's how I learned when I was the first luxury listing I got was like in 2012 or 13 and I partnered with another agent that was doing it and they showed me the ropes and that's how you do it is just partner with somebody that's doing it already. It's great advice because I was talking to someone else about this on the podcast earlier and they were mentioning like

if you want to get into ground of construction or you want to develop a building, just find that developer that's already doing it locally, bring them a deal and do a partnership with them and you're basically saying doing like the same thing. Like find the deal, find the listing, find the buyer, bring it to that listing agent that's crushing it and then have them kind of walk you through it.

Exactly. Cool. And are you currently doing that with your team? Because how big is your team at the moment? Locally we have around probably a hundred agents locally on our team right now. A hundred agents? Yeah, we do. How do you manage all of them? You know, I have partners that help Sean and we have other leaders in our group that help as well. But we're all working together in synergy. So I don't have to manage everything. So let me ask you this. So when it comes to the agents needing support, because obviously as a team leader, that's one of the things you offer.

And they call you. If each agent calls you once a week, that's 100 calls a week. Do you have a system for that? Do you do like live trainings? Do you make yourself available at certain times and other times? No, or what do you do? So we do have live trainings in person once a week. You'll have access to me there.

We'll do that every week. Cool. So a great word of advice for people that are looking to start and scale teams is to put together these group chats or to put together these platforms where you could go out of your way to interact with everyone in a group at once. Because I'm sure if people host a question and you're not even answering it half the time, right? Exactly.

Cool, cool. Now, what are your goals personally when it comes to your business? What are you looking to do now? Now that I've been in it, this is my 18th year, starting my 18th year, which is kind of crazy to say. Yeah. The goal now is to continue the growth with our agents. And I want to see 500 agents by, I would say, January 1st.

Let's go. Let's go. So you want a five exit? Well, that's not locally. Okay. But, you know, we have 265 right now. Perfect. So, sorry, 266 right now.

That's nationwide in your entire organization. Yeah, in the organization. So we want to grow that to 500. So let's go a little bit deeper. You start growing it. You hit 500. Yeah. I hit 1,000.

I hit 1,000. Then you hit 1,000. Then you hit 1,000. Like, what is like the N number? Is there a finite number or is it just always more and more and more? You know, I don't have that end number. sometimes I look at those guys at the top at EXP and they have like 19,000. I would be good at 5,000 honestly to have 5,000 agents that I'm impacting.

Are you sure about that? Because I'm sure you said that about 100 agents still. No, I am sure about it. Yeah, we just love to deliver value and help other agents do what we've been able to do and duplicate it. Awesome. Yeah. Now let's go a little bit more into because you are more of a mentor, a coach. to the people that you are working on your team.

If someone gets their license, what do you recommend they do in the first 90 days to really jumpstart their entire career? The first 90 days, what I would tell them to do is create a VIP list of everybody that they really like. It doesn't even have to be family. It could be friends. Whoever it is that they really like

and put them on a list and contact them 10 times. You got 10. 10 contacts a day. You got to hit that every day. So basically build a database and nurture it like consistently. Consistent nurturing, yeah. And it's such simple advice, but no one really does it. Like, why do you think people are so hesitant to just start reaching out to local family

and friends, colleagues, people they used to work with and just stay in touch with them? Like anyone could do it, but very few actually do. A lot of people are lazy to do it or they have a lot of fear. That's the thing that I see most is that. They don't want to reach out and tell people that they're doing real estate. They might. I see a lot of agents are like, how do you do it? You just build relationship, but people are scared to even do that.

It's funny because I interview a lot of top producers and team leaders as yourself. And for them, it's like, it's like nature. It's like it's just built into their routine. They don't think about it. They just go out there. And like today I got 15 conversations in and I had seven leads out of my database. And this is another day at the office. Whereas a new agent is overthinking the entire process.

They have this fear of rejection, all of these things. So I think that's gold in the sense that, like, you have to work on yourself and have the right mindset first to do this actual business at a high level before you could actually go out there and execute. Did you ever get like mindset training or do you think that came from like your previous career? Like, how do you think you came into this to develop to where you're at the moment? Yeah, mindset training, a lot of books.

I read a lot. They're one of my favorites, infinite possibilities. Have you read that one yet? No, no. That one changed my life and my mindset on. just more abundance mindset and there's nothing impossible that you can do in this lifetime. So once I started getting into that spiritual deep dive, then I started to learn that everything on the outside is created on the inside.

On the inside. And I'm a big firm believer that as long as you believe something's possible and you start doing the action that's necessary, you're going to get some sort of feedback or result. And then based on that feedback result, you could change your action all over again. just like doing this feedback look reiterating over and over again to you actually get to that end goal but i think people set such large goals they start doing the work they realize how much work it actually takes and then they give up um so i think having the right expectation especially as an agent hey you're going to have to be dialing a thousand calls a month if you want to get to where you're at

the month you know exactly yeah cool cool um any uh what do you call anything that you would do differently if you were starting from scratch all over again yeah definitely um i would would team up with a better company. Okay. Yeah, that's what I would have done. So the brokerage matters that you're up. I feel like, yeah, since I started in 2006, if EXP was there in 2006, I would have started at EXP.

You just missed it. It was 2009, nine. Yeah, nine. Yeah, so I just missed it. And I didn't know. I mean, not too many people knew about it. Which is funny because it was started in your backyard. I know up north here in Bellingham.

So that's one thing I would change. And then also my mindset is another thing I would have changed when I first started. Okay, cool. And then what would you tell yourself as far as like a mindset shift if you could go back and speak to like the younger version of yourself? That everything is energy. Yeah. So if your energy is low, then you're going to receive low things. But if it's high and you're vibrating at a high level, you're going to receive higher.

And I think a lot of people don't really take that at face value because like, Like if I meet someone and the energy is low, like I'm immediately like not turned off, but I'm immediately like less receptive to want to like engage with them even more. But if I meet with someone and they're extremely high energy or they're flashy dressing like you, it's like, well, like who is this person? Like they're kind of interesting. And now there's more of like a connection to actually want to engage with them further. So I think people really underestimate the fact that like people subconsciously sense energy levels. And if you could go into a conversation with a lot of passion or a lot of charisma, immediately like people like have an interest in who you are and what you don't. And as always, this is the Gold Bar podcast.

If anyone has any questions, they want to learn more about how we can help them get to their goals faster. Reach out to me on Instagram at Juan, J-U-A-N, Gold Bar. And remember, at Gold Bar, we're looking to help agents build systems to not just scale their business, but essentially scale out of production one day. The same way that Scott's built his massively successful team, we're looking to teach you exactly how to do the same thing, to implementing leverage, staffing, and systems. And that is pretty much it. Have a great day and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thank you.