Jon runs one of the highest-performing real estate teams in the Lehigh Valley, and this particular move sounds excessive until you understand the psychology underneath it. A single open house sign is wallpaper. People drive past it every day, in every neighborhood, and their brain has been trained over years of repetition to filter it out before it even registers as information worth processing. One sign says "there's an open house," which is true, unremarkable, and instantly forgettable a block later. Thirty-five signs say something completely different. They say "something is happening here," and that's a message the human brain is not built to ignore, no matter how busy or distracted the person driving past happens to be.
Sean makes the connection explicit on the clip, tying Jon's approach to the idea of breaking the pattern, or what marketer Seth Godin famously called the "purple cow." In a field of ordinary brown and white cows, nobody notices another brown cow. A purple one stops you cold, not because it's trying harder, but because it's simply different from everything surrounding it. Jon's 35 signs work the same way. Real estate marketing is saturated with the same handful of moves everyone makes: a sign at the entrance, a listing online, maybe a boosted social post. Jon didn't do a better version of the standard move. He did something structurally different, and structural difference is what actually earns attention in a market where everyone has adapted to ignore the standard version.
There's a deeper mechanism at work too, which is intrigue. A single sign answers the question completely: there's an open house, now you know, nothing left to wonder about. Thirty-five signs raise a question they don't fully answer. Why so many? What's happening over there? Is this a huge house, a big event, something unusual? The signs create a gap between what people see and what they understand, and that gap is exactly what pulls people off their normal route to go look. Curiosity isn't a soft, feel-good marketing concept here. It's a mechanical trigger, and Jon engineered his signage to hit it on purpose rather than by accident.
This is a useful lesson for agents, insurance professionals, and small business owners far beyond open house signage specifically. The instinct in most marketing is to do the standard thing, just more politely or more professionally than the competitor down the street. Jon's approach suggests a different question entirely: what would it look like to do something so different in scale or form that people can't process it as background noise anymore? Sometimes that's volume, the way Jon used 35 signs instead of one. Sometimes it's format, timing, or channel. The common thread is that incremental improvements to a familiar pattern rarely break through, while a genuine departure from the pattern almost always does, simply because the brain is wired to notice difference and ignore repetition.
It's also worth noting what this move actually cost Jon: time and legwork, not some clever secret nobody else could access or afford. Anyone could put out 35 signs. Almost nobody does, because it requires more effort than the industry standard and a willingness to look a little excessive before the results prove it was worth it. That's often the real barrier to standing out in a crowded market. It's rarely a lack of ideas. It's a lack of willingness to do the unglamorous, slightly uncomfortable version of the idea that actually gets noticed instead of the safe, familiar version that quietly blends in.
Bricks and Risk is the podcast where Sean Mooney and Tim Garrity sit down with top performers in real estate, insurance, and small business to unpack the strategy, mindset, and hard-won lessons behind building something that lasts.
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