John Barbato’s leap from architecture to real estate brokerage was driven by a simple rule: clients want transparency, not just transactions.
Trained as an architect and frustrated by brokers who failed to communicate while he bought and sold his own properties, Barbato carried that concern into a second career — building a brokerage practice anchored in data, constant updates and visibility into every step of the deal.
Every time he sold, "I wasn’t satisfied with the agent,” Barbato said in an interview. “So I started selling them myself. This was when Craigslist was still big — I sold my first house on Craigslist in the countryside. I just thought, ‘I can do this.’”
Barbato had spent seven years working at small architecture firms in New York after graduating from the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture and Columbia University’s Master of Architecture program. He eventually ran a seven‑person office before deciding he wanted to work for himself and left architecture in 2001.
He began making investments including using his savings to buy a small apartment building outside New York. After renovating and selling it at a profit, he bought another — a pattern that ultimately led him to purchase and sell 11 properties across the Northeast over the next decade, from the Jersey Shore and Hudson Valley to the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
He went on to get his real estate broker’s license and officially entered brokerage in 2010 at Stribling & Associates, the New York luxury residential firm founded by Elizabeth Stribling, before the company was acquired by Compass in 2019, which Barbato joined through the merger.
Career change pays off
The career pivot to becoming a broker turned out to be a calling.
“I absolutely fell in love with brokerage,” Barbato told CoStar News.
As an agent, Barbato makes sure to deliver what he felt was missing when he was on the other side of transactions.
“The number one thing was communication,” he said. “When I was working with brokers, long before I ever thought of being a broker myself, was just wanting to know the whole process and wanting to be kept abreast of every movement. A lot of brokers in my industry don't do that.”
That philosophy led him, early on, to build highly detailed tracking systems while at Stribling. Channeling the attention to detail architects are known for, Barbato created custom spreadsheets for every listing — documenting details such as buyer names, showing dates, repeat visits and feedback.
“I would just keep a running spreadsheet for every listing I've ever had,” he said. As a broker mostly doing sales, “that really set me apart. Then I would have a weekly reminder to share that with my seller.”
At technology‑driven Compass, Barbato now uses the firm’s platform to give clients real‑time visibility into their listings, allowing them to track views, clicks, time spent, device type and geographic locations of prospective buyers if they choose. He also sets it up so once a week his clients get a get a report updating them on what’s happening with their listings.
That data directly shapes how he markets a property, he said, noting that if interest spikes in places such as Aspen, Colorado, he can adjust advertising and messaging accordingly.
“That all rooted from being my own client,” he said. “Working with brokers who never kept me abreast on anything drove me crazy. I get a lot of positive feedback from my clients with that type of individual attention. My business is fueled by repeat referrals and repeat clients. Happy clients refer me and happy clients come back and use me again.”