Early Team Owners Help Watters International Realty Expand Rapidly

Real Estate firm Watters International Realty was founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas. For seven years, the firm worked to carve out a sizable share of the real estate market in Texas, establishing a strong brand and refining an airtight operational model in the process. In 2017 Watters International Realty turned to a team-centric structure, assured of their model’s potential to scale by the success of their first batch of team owners, who signed on to run Watters International-branded realty offices in 2016 and 2017.

One of those first team owners, Chad Brady, signed on to open a Watters International Realty office in San Antonio just 18 months ago, and already he says the brand has allowed him to seize a market share he never imagined when he first became a realtor.

“My goal is to end 2018 as one of the top five real estate teams in San Antonio,” Brady said. “By 2019, I hope to be number one.”

Brady first started in real estate after moving from Kansas to Lubbock, Texas with his wife after college. The agronomy and plant-pathology major had little-to-no experience in real estate and no support network in the new city, but he learned the ropes quickly and managed to eke out a comfortable living.

Early team owners

“Most people break into real estate by chasing down leads through a network of family and friends, but I didn’t have that,” Brady said. “I was cold calling sellers from expired listings, looking for people who tried to sell their houses and failed, and through sheer force of will, I had some success.”

Though Brady had started to establish a network in Lubbock, he and his wife decided to move to Hill Country, so Brady started to research real estate companies in the area. That’s when he discovered Watters International Realty and the firm’s founder, Chris Watters.

Brady was impressed by Watters International’s uniquely agent-centric philosophy. Where most realtors take a shotgun approach, hiring lots of agents and investing minimally in each, Watters’ strategy is to hire and train only the best agents and supply them with the tools and leads they need to make a big return on that investment.

Brady met with Watters, hoping to join the team as an agent, but Watters, impressed with Brady’s hustle in Lubbock, had another idea, and he asked Brady to open a Watters International office in San Antonio. “He saw something in me I didn’t,” Brady said.

What Watters saw in Brady was an eagerness to work hard and the willingness to follow an established model.

“We’re focused on partnering with the strongest, hardest working realty professionals,” Watters said. “That’s our commitment to our clients, and it’s how we want to grow our system. We’ve got a unique and extremely effective model, so it’s essential that we work with agents who are willing to put in the work to apply that model correctly. Chad has a great attitude. He works hard and he’s got an open mind. He wants to learn our system and he wants to grow with it. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

Rapid expansion strategy

In 2016, Brady and his wife moved to San Antonio, where he opened the city’s first Watters International Realty office with just one agent. Since then, the office has grown substantially, taking on a number of agents and a large support staff. Brady said he’s been able to manage that growth thanks to Watters International’s operational model, which provided him with a roadmap to run the business.

“I knew real estate, but I didn’t have any experience running a business,” Brady said. “They taught me all of that, and they gave me the tools to build a team that I could have never built by myself.”

Brady believes that the brand’s focus on building out teams is not just a benefit for team owners, it’s a fundamental improvement on the way real estate businesses have traditionally operated.

“Realty has always been a very independent business,” Brady said. “In any other industry, the sales agent is not doing the advertising and the paperwork and all the deliverables. Real estate is the only industry that does that.

People get into real estate because they want to be their own boss, but they don’t realize just how much work is required. There are only 24 hours in a day, and only so much you can do. By providing a tested and proven model to build out a team, Watters International gives you the opportunity to be your own boss without having to operate every aspect of the business yourself.”

Brady’s Watters International has also benefited from the brand’s stellar reputation in Texas, which Brady said he leans on at every opportunity.

“If I ever go on an appointment with someone who hasn’t heard of us before, I always tell them to Google us,” Brady said. “There is so much amazing, attractive material about Watters International online; videos, reviews, write-ups. The branding is so strong, and it goes a long way to securing the confidence of my clients.”

“They set me with up with a structure that will eventually allow me to step outside of the business entirely,” Brady said. “The problem with real estate is that typically when you retire, that’s it, you aren’t making any more money. But this allows me to step back from the business and maintain ownership so I can continue to earn income even after I’m done working.”

Brady’s success with Watters International, like that of the firm’s handful of other early team owners, is a strong indicator of the brand’s potential as it begins to sign its first team owners, 12 of whom are scheduled to launch before the end of 2018. Watters said he’s confident he’ll continue to find strong owners in each new market the brand enters.

“Our model is extremely effective,” Watters said. “It doesn’t require a wealth of business knowledge or experience. We give our owners everything they need to succeed, it’s just a matter of finding the people who have the passion and perseverance to take the business as far as it can go. We don’t expect to have any trouble finding sharp, hardworking entrepreneurs like Chad in every market, and we’re excited to work with them.”