One conversation with Dean Jackson changed how Taylor Hack thinks about his niche. Here is what they built instead.

by REM Bot

Taylor Hack has been building his real estate team in Edmonton for years. He has a clear sense of who his ideal client is: families with kids, above-average income, a Costco membership and probably a dog. He knows them well because he is one of them.

The issue Dean Jackson identified in their conversation last week was not the profile itself. It was how Taylor had been using it.

“Those are all secondary things,” Jackson had said. “Those are psychographic and demographic parameters. What you get paid for is helping one person sell one house or buy one house.”

A demographic profile describes who you would like to work with. A category is what those people actually buy. The distinction sounds small. The difference in how you build your marketing around it is significant.

In the episode that followed Jackson’s appearance, Andrew Fogliato and Taylor Hack worked through what a category-based approach looks like for Taylor’s specific market, from the ground up, live on the show.

The two kinds of real estate teams

Before getting into the category strategy, the episode touched on a framework from an article by Amy Youngren that Fogliato had been sharing with clients. Youngren describes two distinct types of real estate teams, and argues that most teams struggling to grow have one foot in each.

The first is the sales-focused team. Lead generation is the engine. Conversion metrics are tracked and managed. Accountability is built around the numbers. It is the model most online real estate coaching is built around.

The second is the community-focused team. The database is the asset. Being known and trusted in a specific community is the strategy. Growth comes from depth rather than volume.

The teams that do both tend to do neither particularly well. The culture, the hiring, the systems and the metrics required for each approach are different enough that splitting the difference usually means underperforming on both.

Hack’s team has been moving toward the community-focused model and away from web lead conversion and toward attracting clients through relevance and presence. The Dean Jackson conversation sharpened what that actually needs to look like in practice.

The problem with being too wide

When Hack walked through his existing insider list, nearly 800 people who had opted in to receive pre-market property information, Jackson’s response was immediate. The list was built around general interest in pre-market properties rather than specific interest in a defined category. Every person on it wanted to know about any property that was coming up before it hit the MLS.

Jackson used a grocery store analogy to name the problem. If every aisle in a grocery store is labelled “food,” the label is technically accurate but not useful to anyone looking for cereal. The person looking for townhomes and the person looking for a golf course property are not the same person with the same needs on the same timeline. Putting them in the same bucket and sending them the same content means the content is never quite right for anyone.

The flip, as Jackson framed it: specific interest in a general thing produces better results than general interest in a specific thing. A list of 300 people who have specifically opted in to receive updates about River Valley properties in Edmonton is more valuable than 800 people who opted in to receive any pre-market information you happen to have.

“I’ve been off with the real estate for a long time, Dean,” Hack said. “And we’re a few minutes into this. And I can already see what you’re telling me. It’s like lighting up the map.”

Choosing the right category

The working example that emerged from the episode is the Edmonton River Valley – a category that cuts across more than a dozen neighbourhoods and connects the most desirable and most expensive properties in the market.

The River Valley is Edmonton’s defining geographic feature. The North Saskatchewan River runs through the city with banks high enough to support three ski hills, a mountain bike park under construction, extensive trail systems and a Nordic spa. The properties closest to it command the highest prices in the city. The gap between river-facing and river-backing on any given block is measurable in both price and lifestyle.

Crucially, no agent in the Edmonton market has claimed this category in the way Jackson’s framework describes. Nobody is known for it. The position is open.

Fogliato walked through what the content architecture looks like once the category is chosen. The first piece is a pricing guide: what do properties sell for at different distances and orientations relative to the river? On the river itself? River-facing? Within two blocks? Within the broader River Valley neighbourhoods? Each tier has a different price point, a different buyer profile and a different lifestyle implication.

From that single research base, multiple guides can be built for different audiences. The mountain bikers’ guide to River Valley neighbourhoods. The dog owners’ guide. The runner’s guide. The hospital workers’ guide, dropped with a pin on the Royal Alexandra Hospital for people who need proximity to a specific building. A version for every group whose lifestyle the River Valley serves, which turns out to be a long list.

“Basically, everyone wants it,” Fogliato said. “Then they don’t want their own guide to it. They want the guide specifically for them.”

The efficiency is in the build. Once the core research exists, reskinning it for a new audience is a fraction of the original work. The River Valley pricing data is the same. The introduction, the framing and two or three specific callouts change. The result is a targeted guide that feels built for a specific person rather than a generic resource that could have been made by anyone.

Content as a filter rather than a broadcast

The underlying principle that runs through both Jackson’s framework and this episode is that content should filter for the right person rather than reach the maximum number of people.

Most agents approach content as broadcast. More reach is better. More followers is better. A post that goes wider is a win.

The category approach inverts that. A video about river valley mountain biking attracts mountain bikers who live near or want to live near the River Valley. Everyone else scrolls past. That is not a failure –it is the filter working. The people it reaches are the right people. The people it does not reach were never the point.

Hack described how Jackson made this concrete during their conversation. Taylor had been thinking about going after school zones as his category. Jackson’s response: Do you sell schools? The people who search school zones are looking for a school, not an agent. Go after the thing people actually ask you for.

In Hack’s market, river proximity comes up consistently with his more affluent clients. He is currently working with buyers for whom the acceptable distance from River Valley running trails is measured in city blocks.

What genuine expertise looks like

The episode also included a story from Fogliato about a home inspector he had interviewed that applies directly to this conversation.

The inspector led a team and had conducted thousands of inspections. During the call, one of his newer inspectors messaged him through Slack from inside an active inspection, a photo of an electrical panel with a question. Before answering, the inspector showed Fogliato what he could read from a single image.

From the photo alone, and a small visible section of foundation in the background, he identified the approximate decade the house was built, the likely neighbourhood in Toronto, the probable wiring type, the foundation material and several other details. His inspector sent the question a few moments later confirming most of what he had already said.

The application to real estate agents is direct. Clients do not evaluate expertise by asking questions. They feel it. An agent who can walk into a neighbourhood and immediately read what decade the homes are from, what the turnover rate is, what the pricing tier looks like relative to the street, that agent communicates credibility without saying a word about their track record.

Hack described playing a game in his office called Location Lottery, teammates compete to identify which of Edmonton’s 250-plus neighbourhoods a property is in, what decade its predominant housing stock is from, and the average price range. The goal is to build the kind of fluency that shows in a client conversation without needing to announce it.

“If you get tense inside when somebody mentions a neighbourhood you don’t know,” he said, “that’s the thing to fix. Not your conversion rate.”

The trust move most agents avoid

One moment in the episode is worth pulling out separately, because it applies regardless of which category an agent chooses.

Fogliato made the observation that the fastest way to build trust with a buyer or seller is to tell them not to do the deal. Not every deal. But being willing to say this house is not worth it for you does something that no amount of marketing can replicate.

“There is almost nothing that builds trust faster with someone than telling them not to buy a house,” he said. “Because almost no one ever does that.”

Hack added the mechanics of how this works in a showing context. Rather than waiting for a client to form an opinion and then responding to it, he will sometimes gently test both directions. Nudging toward a house and then pulling back to see which way they lean. The resistance tells him more about where they actually are than anything they say directly.

The willingness to say no is only possible when the agent is not in the business of closing every deal. It is, in part, a product of having a well-stocked pond, enough leads in a specific category that losing one transaction does not feel catastrophic.

That is the connection back to the category strategy. The agents who can afford to tell a client the truth are usually the ones who have built a system that does not depend on any single deal.

The full episode covers the two-team-types framework from Amy Youngren’s article in the REM print edition, the role of brand marketing versus direct response in different stages of a business, and what the first content pieces for the River Valley strategy will look like.