Dean Jackson: The leads are probably better than you think

by REM Bot

Most agents across North America are already using Dean Jackson’s ideas. The nine-word email. The listing multiplier. The concept of building a category-specific lead list and becoming the market maker in a niche. These strategies have moved through coaching programs, mastermind groups and sales training for three decades.

Very few agents have heard them directly from Dean.

Jackson got his real estate licence in 1988 after a conversation with a friend changed his trajectory. He had been a competitive tennis player ranked 180th in the world and was barely scraping by financially. A Swedish friend described a former player who had switched to real estate, owned a house on the Intercoastal, drove a Porsche and was living on his own terms in his mid-forties. The question that landed was: what is the 180th-ranked businessman in the world making?

“I thought, if I switch to real estate now at 21, I would be like the Andre Agassi of real estate,” Jackson said. “I’d be way better at 30 if I switched now than if I continued to pursue tennis at 30.”

He got his licence six months later. Within a few years, he had built a system so effective he never had to make another cold call. He has spent the decades since teaching other agents to do the same.

In a recent episode of The Leads Are Sh*t, Jackson joined Taylor Hack for a wide-ranging conversation about the frameworks that underpin that approach.

Why the belief that leads are poor quality is itself the problem

Jackson has a direct response to the complaint the show is named after.

“When people say the leads are poor quality, they’re making a very subjective judgment,” he said. “In their mind, their definition of a good lead is that somebody calls them today, invites them over tomorrow, and there’s a for sale sign up this weekend. Anything short of that is a bad lead.”

He describes this as a mind virus. The belief that only transaction-ready contacts are worth pursuing causes agents to either ignore or abandon the majority of people who will eventually transact simply because they are not ready today.

His counter: just over half of everyone who inquires about something will do that thing within 100 weeks. That is the base rate. A person who asks for information about townhomes in Edmonton has a better than 50 per cent probability of buying a townhome in the next two years. The only question is whether the agent who generated that inquiry is still present when it happens.

“I just need to treat them like they’re definitely going to be the ones that buy and be there when it’s time,” he said.

Category marketing: stock your pond with the right fish

The core of Jackson’s market-building philosophy is simple to state and almost nobody does it properly: pick a specific category of property, build a list of everyone who might ever buy or sell that type, and become the only name in that person’s mind when the time comes.

He uses the analogy of stocking a pond. If the goal is to catch largemouth bass, you have to stock the pond with largemouth bass minnows. Stocking it with catfish and hoping largemouth bass appear is not a strategy. The category determines the audience, and the audience determines everything that follows.

Categories can be anything that groups properties in a way that reflects how buyers actually think: lakefront, golf course, townhomes, condos, century homes, new construction, homes backing onto a park. The requirement is scale – Jackson’s threshold is roughly 1,000 properties. That is enough to make the economics work and to have a finite, knowable pool of both buyers and sellers.

“Of all the homes that are going to sell in Edmonton, some are condos, some are townhomes, some are semis,” he said. “Whatever attribute you can group people together on, that is the only thing that person is actually concerned about.”

He pointed out that category marketing does not require active listings. An agent can build a list of townhouse buyers, send them regular market updates with new listings in that category and position themselves as the resource for that niche without ever having a townhouse listing of their own. When a listing does come along, the list already exists. The match is waiting.

Hack identified his own version of this problem live during the conversation. His insider list of nearly 800 people had been built around general interest in pre-market properties rather than a specific property type. Jackson’s response was precise: general interest in a specific thing produces better results than specific interest in a general thing.

A grocery store analogy captured it cleanly. If every aisle is labelled “food”, the information is technically accurate but not useful to anyone who is looking for cereal.

The listing multiplier index

One of Jackson’s most frequently referenced frameworks is the listing multiplier index. The premise is that every listing an agent takes creates five distinct scoring opportunities, each worth one point: selling the house, finding the buyer themselves, getting a referral from the seller during the listing period, picking up another listing in the neighbourhood and getting a referral after the transaction closes.

Most agents score between 1.0 and 1.5. Top performers in Jackson’s community score around 3.5.

The math on that gap is significant. Hack runs a team in Edmonton and shared his own numbers: 63 listings in 2025 with a listing multiplier of approximately 1.1. On an average commission side of roughly $10,000, a move from 1.1 to 3.5 would represent an additional $240,000 in revenue from the same number of listings. The work of getting the listings is identical. What changes is how much happens around each one.

“The saddest thing I hear people say is: our market’s hot, they all sell in seven days, I don’t need to do just-listed cards or info boxes or open houses,” Jackson said. “You’re looking at it from the perspective of the one thing you’ve already been paid for.”

Finding the buyer: the market maker position

The highest-value scoring opportunity on any listing, after the sale itself, is finding the buyer directly. Jackson’s approach to this is built around the category system: if you have spent the previous six months building a list of people interested in that type of property, the announcement of a new listing is not a cold outreach. It is a direct message to people who already know you and are waiting for exactly what you now have.

He described the call this produces: hey, I’m showing townhomes in River Run this weekend. I thought I’d call and see if I could tell buyers about your place while I’m there. Do you want me to swing by?

“That’s like saying, I’m going to swing by with a wheelbarrow full of money this weekend,” he said. “You want me to drop some off?”

The framing is charge-neutral. The agent is not asking the seller for anything. They are offering something. The seller either says yes, in which case the agent has created a showing opportunity and established timeline, or they say no, in which case the agent has made a positive impression and learned something about the seller’s plans. Either outcome is useful.

Five-star prospects and the now-or-nurture framework

Jackson’s approach to lead management starts from a clear definition of who is worth investing in. He calls them five-star prospects, and they have five characteristics: they are willing to engage, friendly and cooperative, they know what they want, they know when they want it and they would like your help.

Not every lead meets this standard immediately. The question is not whether they qualify today but whether they are moving toward it. Jackson tracks leads in four observational categories: now, meaning they have engaged and are within the next 90 days; nurture, meaning they have engaged but are further out; active, meaning they are consuming content and showing behavioural signals even without direct conversation; sleeping, meaning they receive emails but show no engagement; and what he calls dead chickens, who have unsubscribed, bounced or asked to be removed.

The critical insight is that a lead who does not return a call is not necessarily a poor quality lead. It is an observational data point. If that same person is opening every email, clicking through to listings and watching videos, the behavioural signal outweighs the non-response. The agent should continue nurturing without reading the silence as rejection.

“The only two timeframes that matter are now and not right now,” he said. “The moment you put a specific timeline on it, it’s expired. You’re trying to guess the market. That’s not a great strategy.”

The Pygmalion effect in lead conversion

Jackson grounds his approach to lead nurture in a well-documented phenomenon from education research. In the original studies, teachers were told that certain students had been identified as gifted. Those students, who had been selected at random, consistently outperformed their historical results. Teachers who were told certain students were trouble consistently saw those students underperform. The difference was not in the students. It was in the expectation the teacher held.

Jackson applies the same principle to leads. Agents who approach their database with the belief that most contacts are a waste of time will treat them accordingly. Minimal investment, quick to disengage, low follow-through. Agents who treat every engaged contact as someone who is genuinely going to transact will invest differently, communicate differently and stay present longer.

“I believe that same thing about leads,” he said. “If you treat each individual like they’re definitely the person that’s going to buy, there’s a much better chance if you treat them that way.”

He frames the investment in a five-star prospect as a love bomb: 100 minutes of contact over 100 days, distributed across what he calls the love languages of lead conversion. Words of affirmation – a message that acknowledges something specific about their situation. Quality time – a conversation that is genuinely about them. Physical touch – something mailed or hand-delivered. Gifts – a thoughtful resource that is actually useful to them. Acts of service – setting up a search, pulling comps, doing something without being asked.

The analogy he used to close the point: Michelin stars were created by a tyre company to encourage people to drive to restaurants, which would wear out their tyres. The Guinness Book of Records was created to give people something to argue about in pubs. Elite-level marketing has always been about creating genuine value for a specific audience in a way that also serves the business behind it.

Physical marketing and the info box

Jackson is a consistent advocate for physical marketing in an environment where most agents have moved fully digital. His reasoning is the same as his reasoning for category marketing: scarcity creates value. When most agents are competing in the same digital channels, the agents who are present in the physical world have less competition and higher visibility.

He was direct about Canada Post’s unaddressed ad mail service as a channel he considers underused relative to its ROI. At roughly 12 cents per piece in many markets, the economics of mailing 1,000 postcards to a targeted area compare favourably to the cost of digital leads from the same geography. That window may be narrowing as Canada Post shifts away from some of those programs, but the principle holds wherever equivalent physical distribution exists.

The info box flyer is the tactic he flagged as most underused for active listings. The reasoning is about intent signalling. A buyer who stops their car, gets out, walks to a for sale sign, takes a flyer, returns to the car, scans a QR code and submits their contact information has demonstrated a level of interest that no passive digital impression can match. The friction of the process is the filter.

He described using this approach on a $2.5 million property on Camelback Mountain in Arizona for his friend and business partner Joe Polish. A dominator postcard – his term for an oversized 12-by-15-inch or larger direct mail piece – was sent to everyone in the valley with a view of the mountain. Info box flyers were placed on the hiking trail that runs past the property. Twenty-eight people attended the open house the Saturday before the Super Bowl.

“When you start thinking like you have to sell this house yourself and you’ve got a deadline, that’s where your creativity comes out,” he said.

The super signature

Jackson closes every email he sends with what he calls a super signature – a brief section at the bottom of the message that offers the reader a charge-neutral next step. The framing is always the same: whenever you’re ready, here are a few ways I can help you.

The options offered depend on the category. For a townhouse-focused business, they might be: join us for a tour of available townhomes, get the monthly Edmonton townhouse report, or find out about properties not yet on the market. The key is that none of the options require the reader to be ready to transact. Each one is useful at any stage of the decision process.

The purpose is twofold. It ensures that every email, regardless of what it is primarily about, contains a clear path for the reader to take a next step. And it maintains the agent’s positioning as a resource rather than a salesperson – someone who is present and prepared when the moment comes, not someone who is trying to manufacture that moment on their own timeline.

“We’re never trying to impose our timeline on people,” he said. “We let them know: I’m here to help you. But whenever you’re ready, here’s what we can do.”