Good ol’ Vlad the Revealer at Celebrity Address Aerial couldn’t resist asking us about a house in the San Fernando Valley’s Studio City neighborhood that recently sold for $2,200,000 to a mysterious blind trust. The nosy Yolanda was all too glad to oblige and after about a minute of research, we can tell y’all that the new owner is a very rich 22-year-old woman named Bethany Mota.
Our Miss Mota grew up as a normal girl from a middle-class Modesto, California family. Well, mostly — the exception to “normal” is that she was homeschooled. Her parents yanked her from public school after Miss Mota experienced extensive bullying. Some mean kids went to far as to make a Facebook group dedicated to bashing her looks! How rude. But perhaps Ms. Mota should be thanking those kids — without them, she might not be the multi-millionaire she is today.
During her 2009 summer break at home, a bored 13-year-old Miss Mota decided to make a YouTube video dedicated to her latest cosmetics purchases. The video — which Yolanda watched in the spirit of research — features a very shy teenage gal showing off her new mascara and such. But it is this unlikely video that launched an empire. A global audience found her relatable and began subscribing to her YouTube channel (“Macbarbie07”) in droves.
Fast forward nine years, and Miss Mota is now not only one of the most famous YouTube celebrities of them all, she is the bonafide most popular online “beauty guru” on the entire planet. Her YouTube channel sports more than 10 million subscribers, and she has more than 5 million followers on the Instagram contraption. Her online fame afforded her a spot on a recent season of Dancing With The Stars (she finished in a respectable fourth place).
The vast majority of Miss Mota’s subscribers are teenage girls, a facet that makes her extremely valuable to savvy, youth-oriented fashion retailers. Said retailers are constantly looking for new and creative ways to market their products to millennials, and thus Miss Mota gets paid big bucks to endorse cosmetics on her YouTube channel. Very big bucks.
To give you an idea of how much money the barely-legal Miss Mota hauls in, Business Insider estimated that she makes more than $40,000 per month from her YouTube ad revenue alone — and that doesn’t include her cosmetics endorsement contracts, of which she has plenty. One skincare company recently paid her $325,000 to fly to Hawaii and film a video at the beach applying their products. Our Ms. Mota also had a clothing line at Aeropostale that generated more than $50 million in sales.
Not bad work if y’all can get it, huh? We would not be the least bit surprised if Miss Mota can actually afford a lot more house than this $2.2 million pad. But really, how much property does a 22-year-old gal need? Or want?
In doing research for this posting, Yolanda stumbled over documentation that shows Miss Mota’s production company — Bethany Mota Entertainment — recently paid more than $130,000 in cash for a brand-new, fully-loaded Range Rover Supercharged. For what that is worth, of course.
So it appears that the young Miss Mota not only lives in style — she drives in it, too.
The two-story Traditional-style house was spec-built in 2015 by a developer and sold that year for $2,070,000 to David Gaillot, a Hollywood producer. In late 2017, during the height of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Gaillot was accused of rape by three different women. As you might expect, Mr. Gaillot got the heck outta Dodge (Studio City) and quickly dumped this house to Ms. Mota at a very modest profit.
Yikes! We hope those allegations aren’t true. But if they are, let Yolanda give Mr. Gaillot some unsolicited advice: don’t go around raping people and your life will be much easier.
Anywho, the listing swears that the property is “NOT your typical spec house” and is “exquisitely customized“. We can’t attest to that, but we do know that the house is situated on a .15-acre flat lot with a two-car garage and grassy front yard. The backyard area contains a rectangular swimming pool with inset spa and an outdoor kitchen/BBQ area plus a covered sitting/dining area.
Oh, and the garage features a built-in electric car charger, in case Miss Mota cares to add a Tesla to her stable.
Wide-plank hardwood floors run throughout the main level. Naturally the 3,888-square-foot house features an open floorpan for maximum space utilization. The family room opens to the kitchen, which is done up swanky with marble countertops and high-end stainless steel appliances (Wolf and such).
The home features a total of 5 bedrooms — all of which have en-suite bathrooms — plus an additional full guest bathroom, for a total of 6 baths. The upstairs “5-star hotel style” (per the listing) master suite has a vaulted ceiling, a sitting area, and a fireplace. The master bath contains a claw-footed master bath, a party-sized shower, and dual vanities.
As far as Yolanda knows, this is Ms. Mota’s first-ever home purchase. Not too shabby, hmm?
Listing agents: Scott & Lisa Sorrentino, Rodeo Realty
Bethany Mota’s agent: Zach Goldsmith, Hilton & Hyland