The differentiator was in his background, not his listings

The Grand Union build, part 5 of 8. Season 1: The Diagnosis.

TL;DR

We went looking for something true about how he worked that a competitor could not copy and money could not buy. It was not in his listings, his service list or his results, because those are the same for every good agent.

It was in his work history, which he had never mentioned in any marketing material, because it was not real estate and therefore did not seem relevant.

That is the pattern in real estate branding, not the exception. People bury the differentiator precisely because it does not look like the category. The tell is that they mention it offhand, in the middle of a sentence about something else, and never in the bio.

Read next: Part 4: You cannot outbid Zillow · SLATT, positioned on the client's situation rather than the job title · Part 6: Outdoor School, a land trust, then luxury residential

Where we looked first, and why it was empty

The obvious places to find differentiation are the places every agent has already looked.

Service list. Every agent buys and sells. Track record. Every agent who is still working has one. Local knowledge. Every agent claims it, and most of them genuinely have it, which makes the claim useless as a claim. Responsiveness, negotiation, marketing of the property itself. All real, all identical on a page.

We spent a while there. It produced a set of true statements that made no difference.

The thing was in the part he did not consider relevant

It came up sideways, the way these things do, in a conversation about something else.

Before real estate, he had worked at Outdoor School. Then at a community land trust focused on permanently affordable housing. Then he moved into luxury residential.

None of that had ever appeared in his marketing. It was not hidden. It simply did not seem like the kind of thing a realtor puts on a website, because a realtor's website talks about houses and closings.

Which is exactly why it was valuable

A differentiator that looks like the category is not a differentiator, because everyone in the category already has it.

The material that actually separates somebody is nearly always the material that does not fit, and it gets left out for that reason. It reads as a digression. It is not on the standard template. Nobody else's site has a section for it.

I have now seen this enough times to treat it as the rule of real estate branding rather than a nice coincidence. The best thing about a business is usually filed under something other than marketing.

The tell is how it gets mentioned

There is a reliable signal, and it is worth listening for.

The differentiator arrives as an aside. It is prefaced with something dismissive. This is probably not relevant, but. Before all this I used to. It is said quickly, in the middle of a sentence about a different subject, and the person saying it moves straight on.

I have watched this happen in a sales call with a lawyer, in a completely different industry, in almost exactly the same shape. Same tell, different room.

Having it is not the same as using it

Finding the material is the easy half.

Three jobs on a résumé is not positioning. It is raw material, and the work is figuring out what that combination lets him see that other agents cannot, and then whether anybody buying a house actually cares.

That is the next part.