Are You Writing for a Lion or an Otter? Cari McGee on Personality-Typed Marketing

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Most agents don’t last three years. Cari McGee has been selling real estate in the Tri-Cities area of Washington since 2004 — and she joins host Jeremy Rivera for a conversation that starts with early web presence and ends somewhere far more useful for marketers: the argument that you should be writing four versions of your content, one for each personality type.

The unfair advantage: owning her own name in 2004

Back then, most agents had no site at all, or a single templated page inside their brokerage’s web presence. McGee’s husband built her one, on her own domain, under her own name — not “Realtor Cari” or “Cari Real Estate For You.” Just carimcgee.com.

“I really definitely had an advantage from the very beginning because I’ve had a web presence from pretty much day one.” Jeremy, who started at real estate website host Advanced Access in 2007 back when a page layout meant “50,000 nested tables just to get the logo in the top right corner,” doesn’t need convincing.

Pick the platform you actually get

McGee has a presence on X, TikTok, and Instagram. Since about 2008, essentially all of her effort has gone into Facebook, and her reasoning is about fit rather than reach.

“The minute I joined, I was like, these are my people. I’m a little bit wordy, I’m a little bit of a talker. So Facebook allowed me to have the extra character-driven narratives that I love to do… The best course of action is to find a social media platform that you just really get and love, have a presence on the others, but go all in on whatever is appealing to you.” — Cari McGee

The post that broke through: an embrace in a parking lot

Asked for a story that actually resonated, McGee tells one she still gets choked up describing. A couple she’d helped buy a house ten years earlier were divorcing, and she was selling it. They arrived at the signing in the same car. Before walking in, they embraced.

She took the photo — carefully, so you couldn’t see their faces — and posted it with the honest caption about what agents are actually privy to.

“For the vast majority of us, we are in these very critical moments with people that we are guiding them through heartbreaking events. Sometimes you need to sell a house because someone’s passed away and you can’t have that memory there. Sometimes you’re selling a house because you have twins and you thought you were just going to have a singleton.” — Cari McGee

It went everywhere. Fellow agents recognized themselves in it. People who knew the couple recognized them. And the audience she actually wrote it for — the average person whose mental model of real estate comes from television, “deals and heels” and investors flying in from China — told her they’d never considered any of it.

“It’s not all balloons and closing and champagne corks popping. There’s so much more to it.” The marketing lesson is one every service business could copy: the content that cuts through is the one that contradicts the cliché of your own industry.

Rockstar Rewards: staying in front of people who already know you

McGee runs a program called Cari McGee Rockstar Rewards with a deliberately loose entry requirement. You qualify if you’ve bought, sold, or referred — or if someone asks who your realtor is and you say her name.

Members get monthly giveaways, events, and coffee coupons. The point isn’t the coupon. “I’m in front of them every month reminding them, hey, I exist and I care about you. I didn’t just sell you this house and forget about you.”

Jeremy frames the strategic logic: a home purchase has an enormously long funnel — it starts with someone Googling how to check their credit score — so the play isn’t chasing new audiences with new content. It’s being a permanent touch point in the community, including for transactions you won’t be part of.

“We all know as business people that the cost of obtaining a new client is much more expensive than the cost of keeping an existing client… I’m in it for the relationship. I want them to come back to me not because I’m needy or codependent, but because I did an amazing job.” — Cari McGee

She extends that to knowledge itself. Most agents know every good contractor, lender, and hairdresser in town because they’ve lived there for years. “But unless you share that information with your clients, then it’s dead information. Why would you just keep it in the vault?”

“That lender is never going to see you at the grocery store”

Her sharpest argument for local is about accountability, not sentiment. She’s watched internet-lender pre-approval letters evaporate at closing — “that email with the pre-approval letter, it is not worth anything.”

“That lender is never going to see you at the grocery store. That lender is never going to be pumping gas next to you. So if they screw up for you, they make this deal die, they don’t care — they’re never going to see you again. But myself and the local lenders that I refer clients to, those are the ones who you might see at our local minor league ball game.” — Cari McGee

Jeremy’s three-word version: no skin in the game.

What masks taught her about her own job

Washington’s COVID showing rules allowed only two people in a house at a time, so McGee walked couples through homes one at a time, masked. Sixteen years into her career, that constraint surfaced something she’d never consciously noticed.

“Until that moment… I had not realized how often I looked at couples to see the nonverbal clues they were giving each other, walking through houses about whether this was the house… And even if they could, I wouldn’t have been able to see it, because they had masks on.” — Cari McGee

Which leads directly to her position on AI: she understands the value, expects it to improve, and thinks it will eventually feel like talking to a friend — but not yet. “At this point we are feeding it what it needs to get better. Skip the middleman and go talk to a person who right now can help you get that information… There are people that need you to hold their hand and say, this is step one, this is step two.” A model can produce a list. It can’t watch someone’s face while they read it and see that they didn’t follow a word of it.

The idea worth stealing: personality-typed content

This is where the episode turns into a marketing conversation. McGee reads clients through the DISC framework almost immediately — and her illustration of the four types is the best version of it we’ve heard. Four people waiting for an elevator:

• D (driver / lion) — pushing the button that everyone has already pushed. Chop chop, let’s move.
• I (influencer / otter) — “Oh my gosh, you’re going to the fifth floor? That’s where the pool is, you’re going to have so much fun.”
• S (steadiness / golden retriever) — hears “hold the elevator” down the hall, and holds it.
• C (conscientious / beaver) — silent, reading the maximum weight limit, estimating everyone’s weight.

In a showing, the same four sound like: how much is this house and how do I get it (D); I love this color, I could throw so many parties here (I); does my partner like it (S); if we offer X and they counter, that’s an additional $1,492 a month (C).

Then Jeremy makes the leap: digital marketers write one piece of content and implicitly assume everyone consumes it the same way. Why isn’t personality type part of a content plan?

McGee runs with it, using a car dealership as the worked example:

“The I is gonna be like, picture yourself driving down the highway, wind flowing through your hair. And the D is gonna be like, how soon can I get it? And the C is gonna say, what’s the gas mileage, how much does it cost me to own this car? And the S is like, does it get me where I need to go to help people?” — Cari McGee

Her suggested mechanic is self-selection — let people click into the version written for them. It connects neatly to something Jeremy heard from Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked: the shape of a query changes the People Also Ask results it surfaces. “I need a red car” and “I need a four-cylinder with all-wheel drive under this budget” are two different people asking about the same product.

The self-audit Jeremy lands on: am I providing anything useful to the stickler for detail? Am I ever writing enthusiastically? Or is every page on my site written in exactly the same tone?

Commercial vs. residential is a personality filter

McGee doesn’t do commercial, and knows why. “It’s out of my range for what I can do well.” But she reads the difference through the same lens: commercial attracts far more Ds and Cs, and almost no Is. “No business person wants somebody to walk in and say, oh, do you see the vision? Oh my God, I love it.” They want the cost and the timeline.

Which is a genuinely useful filter for anyone writing B2B copy: the emotional pitch that works in residential is the wrong instrument entirely.

She also gives the honest appeal of the commercial side — larger commissions and something closer to Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five hours.

Seasonality: know your split, and don’t write yourself a story

McGee’s own numbers: if she sells 30 houses in a year, roughly 20 close between April and October and 10 between November and March.

The value isn’t the ratio — it’s that she knows it. “I don’t necessarily freak out in November where I’m like, I just had all this business, now where did it go? I know that it’s cyclical.” First-time buyers show up in April and May with their tax refunds; spring brings people out to look.

The trap she warns about is the limiting mindset that follows.

“In real estate, what you do today shows up 30, 60, 90 days later. So you take off the month of December because it’s dead — well, then you’re super duper hurting in February and March of the next year… It’s up to you to go get it, and not tell yourself a story that it’s not there, because it is there.” — Cari McGee

Her reframe for a discouraged friend, and probably the best line in the episode: you’re Julia Roberts, waiting for her next excellent role to be offered to her. “Julia Roberts does not sit at home going, I hope people will send me something. Julia Roberts knows she’s amazing. Julia Roberts knows she’s going to have another offer very soon.”

Connect with Cari

Cari McGee owns and leads the Cari McGee Real Estate Team at RE/MAX Northwest in the Tri-Cities, Washington — Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, plus West Richland, Burbank, Benton City, and the surrounding southeastern Washington area. Start at carimcgee.com, which points to everywhere else, including the Rockstar Rewards program.