Show Recap: A free-running app just became our real estate content strategy

Andrew Fogliato saw a screenshot on social media claiming something specific: a popular fitness app’s public heat map, showing where users run and cycle most, lines up almost perfectly with a city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.

The app is Strava, widely used by runners and cyclists to track routes, pace and distance, and to compare themselves against a large, engaged, competitive community. Every user’s public activity contributes to an aggregate heat map showing exactly where people spend their time moving through a city.

Fogliato pulled it up live on a recent episode of his weekly sales and marketing show, alongside Taylor Hack, to test the claim against Edmonton.

The River Valley, the exact area Hack has spent recent episodes building a dedicated niche strategy around, lit up immediately as the most active zone in the city.

“What the marketing people on Twitter were talking about,” Hack said, “is how this is correlated to higher-priced real estate.”

Turning a map into content

The insight on its own is interesting. What made it useful was what Fogliato and Hack did with it next.

The app allows filtering by activity type – running, cycling, mountain biking – each producing a slightly different map. Runners cluster closer to the core activity zone. Cyclists and mountain bikers range further out, since a bike covers more ground in the same amount of time. That range difference translates directly into a content idea: show buyers exactly what distance from a desirable feature is actually costing them.

“Here’s the average price in this area, average price in this area,” Fogliato said, describing the format. “You spend two grand on a nice bike, save a hundred grand on a house.”

The framing works because it answers a real, specific question buyers already have without them needing to ask it directly. An agent can show, with real numbers, the price gap between living close enough to walk somewhere daily versus living just far enough out to need a car, or a bike, to get the same access. Hack’s read on why that lands: most agents talk in mapping software terms, meters and kilometres. Buyers think and talk in minutes. A five-minute walk, a five-minute bike ride, a five-minute drive. Content built in that language converts better than content built in a surveyor’s language.

Where the signs actually belong

The most immediately actionable idea to come out of the discussion was about physical placement, not digital content.

If a heat map shows exactly where runners, cyclists, or hikers pass through most often, that data points directly to where an open house sign should go beyond the property itself.

“If you think you’re likely by, or someone who’s hiking, go put your open house sign at the trailhead entrances that most people use,” Fogliato said, “because you know that they’re coming by there on foot all the time.”

The same logic extends to sponsorship-style placements, water refill stations, branded trail markers, anything that puts an agent’s name in a location their actual target buyer already passes through daily, provided local rules allow it. The point isn’t the specific tactic. It’s using real behavioural data instead of a guess to decide where physical marketing actually belongs.

Content hierarchy: what comes first, and what comes later

The heat map idea led to a broader conversation about how to sequence content over time, one that runs directly counter to how Hack had originally planned his own niche strategy.

Hack described an early draft built heavily around school zone content, based on some early testing, before a conversation with marketer Dean Jackson changed his approach. Jackson’s challenge: out of ten people considering a move, how many actually lead with school zone as their first stated priority? For most buyers, Jackson argued, it’s less a primary decision driver and more a background check, they mainly want confirmation the school zone isn’t a dealbreaker, not detailed rankings up front.

Fogliato’s experience selling real estate backed the same conclusion, with a caveat. School content is genuinely valuable, just not as the entry point. “School content is actually really good when you’re going deep on an area, but it’s not the primary content,” he said. What it does exceptionally well is pull in hyperlocal search traffic, parents searching a specific school by name will land on a page built around that school, and from there discover the rest of an agent’s content.

His recommended sequence starts at the opposite end from where many agents begin. Build the highest-intent, bottom-of-funnel content first, the direct case for hiring a specific agent to sell in a specific area. Then layer in supporting depth over time: neighbourhood parks, community centres, schools, each with its own dedicated page, each hyperlinked back into the core piece. Only in year two or three does the content justify going further, interviewing a school principal, a local shop owner, the people who give a place its actual character.

“You’re almost treating it at that point like a journalist,” he said. “I want to start with the most in-depth stuff, and then I’m going to start doing interviews over time to add depth and character to the full story.”

The foundational content needs to exist first. Depth without a foundation, in his view, is effort spent in the wrong order.

Building the team behind the strategy

Hack also laid out who he’s bringing in to execute the broader River Valley strategy, a signal of how seriously he’s treating the shift from generalist to niche specialist.

Dean Jackson is coming on as a paid consultant to help sharpen the overall vision. Andrew Fogliato continues on the marketing side. Implementation coach Brayden Wheatcroft, who also has a cinematography background, was brought in specifically to close the gap between planning and execution, an area Hack was candid about being his own weak point. Tom Storey is contributing on the video and YouTube side.

“This strategy is too large to have a miss,” Hack said, citing a rule of thumb he’s followed before: commit roughly 10 to 15 per cent of a strategy’s expected cost or time specifically toward getting expert input before execution, rather than finding out what was missing after the fact.

The full episode covers Andrew’s experiment building an entire personal website with no traditional back end, run purely through conversations with Claude, why 99 per cent of agents should not attempt to build their own AI tools from scratch, and a live debate about how much of a modern real estate business can safely run inside consumer AI tools versus dedicated, secure platforms.

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