Show Recap: Buy one property. Tell everyone. That’s the whole strategy.

Alex Wilson has built his real estate business around one niche for roughly a decade. First, it was Toronto pre-construction condos, until the city got too expensive to keep selling the story. Then it was Calgary investment condos, until that market cooled. Now, as government incentives and adjusted builder pricing bring pre-construction back to life, he’s watching the cycle turn again.

“A niche is good until it completely shuts down,” he said. 

What never changed, through every market shift, was the actual message underneath the product. Wilson sat down with Andrew Fogliato on a recent episode of The Leads Are Sh*t, with Taylor Hack away, and offered what a tidbit: one specific, immediately actionable piece of advice for anyone willing to use it.

The niche was never the product

Wilson’s business has weathered a near-complete product change without losing its identity, and understanding why matters more than the specific tactic that follows.

“The niche wasn’t pre-construction,” he said. “The niche was the messaging of buying real estate and building financial freedom, long-term wealth, build your own pension plan. Why we sell condos is typically condos are the easiest investment type for people to own.”

He laid out the case plainly: a condo is largely a concrete box with a tenant and an appliance warranty. A freehold rental property comes with plumbing, landscaping, structural issues and, in his own experience managing a triplex, tenants arguing about whose turn it is to take out the garbage. For an ordinary investor without the bandwidth to manage all of that, a condo is the version of real estate investing that actually fits their life.

The product, in other words, was never the message. Financial freedom through real estate ownership was the message. The condo was just the easiest vehicle to deliver it, right up until it wasn’t, at which point Wilson adjusted the vehicle and kept the message exactly the same.

The advice: buy something, then tell everyone

The specific tactic Wilson offered is aggressively simple, and he was direct that its simplicity is the entire point.

Buy a piece of real estate. Any piece, in any market condition. Then tell your entire database that you did it, and host a webinar walking through your reasoning: why this asset, why now, what it does for your long-term position.

“You will turn that piece of real estate you bought into a five times multiple,” he said, “because you’ll do five to ten transactions by telling everyone in your database that you bought a piece of real estate. Money follows money, and they will follow you.”

His reasoning for why this specific move works better than almost anything else an agent could do: an agent is, by his own account, the single hardest person in the world to convince to buy real estate. Agents are in the market every day. They see the bad deals and the good ones. They know exactly what a fair price looks like before anyone tells them. If an agent has convinced themselves enough to write their own cheque, that conviction is real, tested proof, not a sales script.

“Why not turn all your work when you’re analyzing an asset to purchase,” he said, “and turn that into a multiple, and sell that expertise?”

The stat he offered as a closer: only a quarter of real estate agents actually own investment real estate themselves. Compare that, he said, to financial advisors and their own portfolios, most of whom hold the products they sell. The gap isn’t a coincidence. It’s an opportunity sitting in plain sight for any agent willing to close it publicly rather than privately.

Why billboards don’t make the list

Wilson has never run a billboard campaign, and his reasoning doubles as a broader lesson about niche marketing generally.

“My niche isn’t the whole world,” he said. “If I put a billboard out there, it’s not attracting who I want. I know who I want to talk to, and I’m better off taking other avenues.”

For his target client, largely C-level executives at large companies, that means LinkedIn over mass advertising. It means a physical shirt that reads I Sell Toronto Condos, worn in condo lobbies and elevators as what he calls a free billboard. It means, for a recent five-million-dollar luxury listing outside his usual market, hand-delivering brochures directly to local financial planners, on the logic that their clients are exactly the buyers for that property.

Fogliato offered a supporting example from a different industry entirely: Rolls-Royce reportedly skips car shows in favour of private airplane exhibitions, on the logic that anyone shopping for a ten or twenty million dollar jet won’t blink at an extra half million for the car that picks them up at the tarmac. The lesson underneath both examples is the same. A billboard is not too expensive to be worth it. It’s too broad to be worth it, aimed at a crowd that mostly isn’t the buyer at all.

Client appreciation, without the client appreciation party

Wilson doesn’t host a traditional client appreciation event. He was candid about why: with three young children, he doesn’t have the evenings for it, and he suspects most of his clients, who skew toward a similar life stage, don’t particularly want to spend an evening socializing with their real estate agent either.

Instead, he hosts private box experiences at Toronto Blue Jays games and select concerts, capped at a small group, positioned less as a real estate function and more as a genuinely good time someone would say yes to before checking their calendar.

“You’re saying yes before even checking with your wife that you’re available,” he said, describing the pitch, “versus, I don’t know if I can go Thursday night.”

The event functions as ongoing contact with past clients without ever feeling like a follow-up call. Quarterly market insights round out the touchpoints in between. The goal, in his words, is a continued presence as the only person a past client ever thinks of when real estate comes up, by consistently providing value rather than periodically asking for a referral.

Getting recommended by AI, and what happens after

Wilson has been actively building his Google and Rank My Agent reviews with a specific goal in mind: showing up when large language models get asked who the top agent in a category is.

“I got so excited when I got my first lead that came from ChatGPT,” he said. “I’d been working hard on it for a couple of months, and it finally came through.”

He described directly asking ChatGPT why it wasn’t recommending him for Toronto condo sales despite his track record, and getting genuine, specific feedback on what would improve his standing. Fogliato’s practical addition: when soliciting reviews, prompt the client to reference the specific thing you want to be known for by name. If the goal is ranking as a top Toronto condo agent, the review script should nudge the client toward saying condo specifically, not just a general compliment, because AI models read and weight that language directly.

The two also compared notes on a related story from a separate episode, a competing condo agent who ranked his own AI-sourced leads seventh out of his lead sources by quality, not because the leads were bad, but because buyers were often interviewing multiple agents using the same AI-generated question list and then returning to the AI afterward to help decide between them.

Wilson’s response to that dynamic was characteristically direct. He’s not worried about losing a decision to an algorithm, because his entire strategy is built around getting the in-person meeting. “All I need is to get my foot in the door,” he said, describing a philosophy he traces back to competing for co-op placements in university with a thin resume. “If I want the business, I’ll get the business, because that’s what I’m good at.”

The full episode covers how Wilson has adjusted his messaging as the market has shifted over the past two years, his approach to onboarding new team members around the same buy-and-tell strategy, and a detailed breakdown of what he’d change about a recent brochure campaign targeting financial planners near a luxury listing.

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