ELKO — In 2016, after 12 years working as a medical assistant, Colette Reynolds switched careers to real estate. Reynolds said the change helped her find her "absolute niche." "I found a career I could carry over my passion for caring for others and my love for shopping.
What an ideal job for me," she said. "I hit the ground running and quickly became a top producing agent right out of the chutes and remain one still to this day." She said her accolades "make me proud because they reflect my hard work and dedication even through painful and difficult times of medical struggles.
" Since switching to real estate, Reynolds has received awards including Gold for best local real estate agent five years in a row; voted top Realtor in the Elko Readers Choice awards; the Colette Reynolds Group LLC won Gold for best team in 2022 a year after launching the team; 2019 Champion of Elko as the person who gives back the most to the community; with her previous affiliation with C21 she won top Nevada producer for 2020 and The Centurian Gold award. Further, when with eXp Realty, she was named “Icon Agent” from 2021 to 2023 and was named Best of Zillow four consecutive years, ranking in the top 1% of the Best of Zillow agents in the nation for her client care. Now with LPT Realty, she was ranked and publicly recognized as being among the top 10 LPT agents nationwide, and No.
2 in the first quarter 2024 for the western region of Nevada, Colorado, Idaho and Arizona. Even after taking a month off following the death of her best friend of 25 years to cancer in January, she saw her numbers would have placed her as No. 1 for the quarter.
"And as much as I did love my time and experience in medicine, I knew almost instantly and still to this day that my “move” to a career in real estate was the best move I could’ve ever made. It is most definitely my calling in life," she said. Not long after switching careers, her spinal bone fusion began giving her trouble.
Then, “we found out my fusion had completely failed when we got a second opinion, went to the Mayo Clinic and I had no bone left around my screws by this time, they had been whittled away. So what was happening was my screws were floating.” And while the medical issue from 2015 presented "a very trying, very difficult, painful, and definitely unexpected time" for three years, it got even worse.
Her condition developed "a new pain unlike any pain I had ever experienced" due to those floating screws, sometimes "hitting raw and open nerves" in her neck. "This lasted two months straight before we got the answers we needed and found the best of the best of surgeons to do the surgery needed to save my spine and save my life," she said. She had further fusions over two separate days of surgery.
"While on the operating table in my first surgery the unimaginable occurred. The very small bit of bone left in my C7 broke and caused me to immediately suffer an internal decapitation. But by God’s grace my surgeon explained it was nothing short of a miracle this happened while in the OR and not on our eight-hour drive from Elko to San Francisco.
Internal decapitations are extremely rare. I was told the only thing more rare is surviving having this happen." She said she continued to work the two months leading to the surgery and even from her hospital bed.
"I still recall the day my surgeon came in and caught me on the phone with my broker working and he said 'No more work!' My husband Mike responded with a quick, “Oh, you do not know my wife.” She was recuperating at home from July 2017 to January 2018, but still finished the year in the top-10 agent rankings. But she saw some business decline and decided to let people know she was still in prime form.
So in 2019, she created her "quirky Colette listing videos." "I began making my silly and entertaining listing videos where I would jokingly pop out of pantries and small spaces in my listings just to prove to the world I wasn’t broken, and boy did that work," she said. "My videos took off like wildfire and my business did too.
" She said her husband saw her getting busier, so he got his real estate license in 2020 to help. But also in 2020, another medical setback. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed a rare and aggressive sarcoma in her neck.
"This type of tumor actually devours muscle, tissue and even bone on contact," she said. She found an Ohio doctor who specialized in these tumors at the James Cancer Institute. "When they got to my tumor it was less than a centimeter away from my spine and all my hardware.
They said had we even waited two weeks it would’ve been too late. She said she lost neck muscles, 2 inches of motor nerve and much of her upper back muscle to the cancer, "leaving me with only about 30% function in my left arm." She worked at home using techniques and exercises taught to mastectomy patients and now has 75% use of her arm.
Reynolds later was told by experts, including her Ohio surgeon, who reviewed her medical records her original surgery in 2015 was unnecessary. Since that fusion led to the loose screws in her neck and, later, likely precipitated her cancer, she found a new way to vent: TikTok. "It was right then I knew exactly what I needed to do," she said.
"I needed to get on TikTok and start telling my incredible story of surviving the unsurvivable multiple times and teach others to seek a second and even a third opinion before ever letting anyone do surgery on them." She posted her first video a month later and a year later had her first viral video, in 2021, which attracted 11 million views. This was the video that changed everything for Reynolds.
"My account blew up. A video where I was waxing my face telling 20-year-old me all the advice I know now that I wish I knew when I was young. With each pull of the wax I spewed another piece of advice and as I continued making these same videos, by year's end I had hit 1 million followers.
All by waxing my face/doing my makeup while sharing my life advice. I was soon known as TikTok's cool auntie." She said TikTok allowed her to be creative.
"I was accepted for everything that made me me. Really me," she said. "The Auntie Authentic Colette cat was out of the bag.
" She said she has always been a Christian and "always had a beautiful relationship with God," but there also had "always been something else that I never really understood could never go hand in hand with my faith." "That is, until God opened my eyes to the truth in October 2022. I had always had the ability to see and speak with spirits since I was 4, a gift I had always thought was God given.
In October of 2022 God opened my eyes to the truth that this gift was never from him and at the same time I was born again, denouncing my gift as a medium and dedicating not only my entire life to Jesus but also and immediately my entire TikTok page," Reynolds said. "I began to share my testimony and found hundreds of other new age mediums, tarot readers, etc., had gotten the exact message from God the exact same time as myself.
At this time, I had 1.8 million followers and as I continued to share the Gospel and delve into biblical prophecies and 'conspiracy theories' my account continued to grow. What at one time I worried would get me cancelled by denouncing my psychic medium abilities has actually has not only grown my account now to 2.
3 million but has also now helped thousands and thousands of my beautiful followers find Christ and a relationship with him." Rolling Stone magazine reached out to do a story about Reynolds in January titled "This Nevada Realtor Became One of TikTok’s Biggest Conspiracy Theorists." "I had another Realtor from back East email after the Rolling Stone magazine article, expressing how grateful she was for finding me and seeing how I had truly shared and embraced the real me on social media without worry as to how it might affect my career and because of me she has now started doing the same and her business is even better than ever before," Reynolds said.
She said if that surgery in 2015 had never occurred, she wouldn't be the same person, the successful TikTok star and the influencer of other Realtors. "Sometimes we have to struggle for our salvation and sometimes our struggles are what bring others the salvation they never had, like in my case and all the people that because of that surgeon in a roundabout way, they now have along with their newfound faith and relationship each have with God, because had he not I wouldn’t be Auntie Colette on TikTok today," she said. Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly!.
