The Founder’s Journey

Three imagination moments anchor everything that follows.

Born in Kelowna, British Columbia, into a family of Dutch immigrant farmers and realtors. Her father, Hank Van Nes, worked at HSBC in the Okanagan before moving the family back to the Fraser Valley, and she grew up on a raspberry farm in Abbotsford. Gymnastics came young; later, Dressage with her thoroughbred, Zoe. In high school it was rugby: captain of BC’s U-19 team, starting Hook on the BC Women’s team, and a spot representing Canada in the U-23 program at Shawinigan Lake.

Hank went on to become a commercial and residential REALTOR with RE/MAX. She lost him early in her career, before she ever got to practice real estate alongside him.

“yet I feel like he’s taught me everything I know.”

She moved to New Zealand to further her rugby career and live life, and stayed nine years: rugby, surf lifesaving, cricket, and advertising and sales at the Dominion Post newspaper.

“I loved the active lifestyle, challenging environments and meeting deadlines in a fast paced work space.”

Back in British Columbia, she went into real estate full time in 2008. Her rookie year, 2009, closed 73 deals and earned her Rookie of the Year with the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Over her career she has been registered with four BC real estate boards: the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, the Association of Interior Realtors, and the Chilliwack board. Before 2016 she also helped Pathway Executives grow from a team into a brokerage in Chilliwack.

The books of this era were paperbacks, all Gary Keller: The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, read in 2009, the foundation of her career; SHIFT, read in 2010 in the aftermath of the 2008 and 2009 crash; and The ONE Thing, read in 2013, the year of the first imagination moment. Their shelf lives on The Founder’s Bookshelf.

In 2016 she stepped back from active practice: three years working for a local SaaS company, referring her real estate business out rather than selling it herself. The 2016 imagination moment, the laptop lifestyle and the adventure life, lands here. Her first listen of The Rise of Superman traces to around this era; the copy on the shelf today is a July 2021 re-acquisition.

She came back to active practice around 2019, joining eXp Realty. Then the Friday morning, the Loonshots recommendation, and an Audible account whose entire history is four orders across one summer: Loonshots in May 2019, Brave New Work eight days later, Holacracy in July, Youtility in July. All four sit on The Machine shelf. Youtility is the one she credits with the give-first instinct that runs through everything MRE does. In her words, it

“inspired me to give as much away to the community as absolutely possible”

There was a Kelowna chapter in this stretch too: briefly licensed at eXp Realty in Kelowna around 2019 and 2020, marketing eight townhouses at Brookside, travelling mostly by motorcycle. Within about two years she was back at the Fraser Valley board.

At the end of 2020 she began onboarding with Lofty, the platform then called Chime. Her verdict, and the sentence the whole company grew out of:

“I had been onboarding with Lofty end of 2020 and I felt it was complicated but worth getting to know it, and mentally chronicled the journey in the hope to help others succeed with it, and collaborate as a result of it.”

That chronicle was later formalized as the seven-stage Realtor Lofty Learning Curve, and it is the founding narrative of Most Referred Expert.

The original offering in this era was EVA, Executive Virtual Assistance: transaction management, contract creation through submission. She still calls it the seed of a future per-market workflow, and she is plain about why it stopped being the focus:

“For each market it is different, which is why I pivoted away from that as my focus in early 2021.”

The referral network ran through this era on the Chime stack: a Vancouver-based network of licensed realtors, her own service area running Squamish to the Okanagan, referrals accepted across all of Canada. The approach stood out enough that Chime invited her to present it to their community.

A Machine-shelf book arrived between the inner-work titles: Building an Empire, November 2020. Browse the era on the Bookshelf.

The same two years carried a parallel thread, and it started long before them. The study came first:

“I had watched every single Dr Joe Dispenza lecture multiple times prior.”

Six-plus years of that study, and then in May 2020 Brian Scott’s The Reality Revolution arrived on the shelf and took the meditation craft further: “better experience, better music, softer voice, deeper and more varied subject matter”. That lineage later shaped the real-estate meditations she created for SUCCESS Coaching and published on her YouTube channel.

The why of this shelf is hers, in her own words:

“I often say if Realtors didn’t start off with ADHD they will get Realtor onset ADHD from all the ups and downs, from the intensity and short turn around nature of the deal, and the constant interruptions and thinking on our feet, and from the stress of it all. Working through the physical stress is a skill in itself.”

And the teaching she attaches to it:

“turning the pressure into abundance, a lack mindset into plenty. The Realtor turning the ‘open for business’ sign on above their head. Calmness through conflict is one thing, problem solving will be at its maximum, but thinking you need a deal or you won’t be able to pay next month’s mortgage gives a Realtor commission breath — it is not an attractor, it is a mindset that will deliver a signal to the universe that there is not enough. And the universe will answer the call and deliver more of not enough.”

Health and wellness may not sound like a real estate draw. Her answer: “but I think it is all connected.”

The ledger of these two years tells the story on its own. The Joy of Missing Out opened the era in April 2020. One June 2020 order carried Profit First, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and the second You Are the Placebo meditation together. Becoming Supernatural closed the deepest study year on New Year’s Eve 2020. Then the flow cluster in 2021, four Kotler and Wheal titles between April and July, which “all spoke to my athlete’s heart”; flow, for her, is lived athletic history. Recapture the Rapture arrived in May 2021, two years to the day after Loonshots. The era closed on the Meaning shelf: Beyond the Known and Maps of Meaning in September 2021, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor in October 2021. The Flow and Mind & Energy shelves are on the Bookshelf.

In February 2023 a new Audible login opens with Winning on Purpose, the book behind the name: being most referred is the whole thesis. Five orders in six months: Winning on Purpose in February, Bold in April, Exponential Organizations in June, Abundance in early August, Mind Hacking Happiness Vol. II five days later. 2023 is the year the reading turned from inspiration into operating doctrine.

Exponential Organizations she had owned in paperback years earlier; the Audible date placed it in this chapter, and her ruling on that stands: “this is a nice timeline to reflect.” ExO went on to become the 10X Shift workbook and the operating doctrine of the network.

The same year included a seat on the Chime Mastermind panel. The Doctrine shelf is on the Bookshelf.

Three founding maps inside one week of February and March 2025: the company, the Global Referral Network, and the Most Referred Expert Community. The oldest map in the archive still shows the lead-generation stack she walked away from; the founding maps show the turn, in her own node text: “Listings > Leads > Leverage”. The community map set six Pillars of Value that still map to the community’s surfaces today: Contracts, Sales, Technology, Masterminds, Courses, Network.

The model came out of a lesson she names plainly. Years of one-time projects taught her this:

“they can be good for one time payments, but often need to be highly documented and without a very clear roadmap the client can feel underdelivered even if the deliverable is robust. Often there is something lost in translation.”

“based on that past experience I was inspired to create a community, a referral network, where I can give as much of my goodness for as little as possible and where I can also grow.”

Who is it for? The average agent. In her words, “they’re just as stressed, overspent, overworked, and often underpaid.” What she gets back is “a massive feedback loop when relieving the anxiety and day-to-day pressures for the average agent.” And how the network gets built: “ties that bind, through real, genuine and authentic business interactions.”

From September 2025 the maps turned into method, month by month: seller prospecting in September, LoftyRx in October, the Lofty website set-up system in November, the AI-native tech stack in May 2026. One map, a scripted recruiting machine drawn in December 2025, was deliberately shelved: give-it-away won.

None of it was built alone. She calls it “the history of my CoLab, my group of collaborative & geeky agents, all learning and sharing from and with each other.” The healthy friction inside that group is why MRE has a standard of its own:

“there is a bit of jockying and competition between them, in a healthy way, but enough static that it forced me to learn it for myself to distinguish what is the most referred way.”

The proof the method transfers is in the members who run it themselves:

“Jeffrey Thompson and Justin Newman are two who are making the most of everything they have learned and are DIY’ing it themselves. I would glean as much if not more from Jeff & Justin any time they share in an AMA or Workshop.”

On giving the teaching away, her ruling is short:

“I don’t think we win gatekeeping information.”

On the coaching side, she was certified as a SUCCESS® Certified Coach in July 2026. Her own realtor-specific framework is The Most-Referred Method, three layers in sequence: Capacity, Identity, Action. The line she flags as personally resonant from that season: “being small, purposeful and building what matters”.

Most Referred Expert is a referral network of independent agents building their own brands. Asked about the agents in the network, her answer is short:

“I am not the boss of them.”

Today Katie Van Nes builds and teaches the Area Authority Method: free to attend Live at the Lofty Master Class every Wednesday and Saturday, and built done-for-you as the Trust Engine. Her son Cullen builds alongside her.

The bookshelf canon went open in 2026 under a standing rule of hers:

“I will purchase atomic habits and anything else that comes up that is applicable to my founder’s journey”

Atomic Habits is book twenty-nine: read in hardcopy, the hardcopy passed to her boys, the Audible copy incoming. The purchase ledger’s last entry is August 2023; in 2026 the canon went open when the Bookshelf became a living project.

The purpose, in her words:

“the idea here if you haven’t already gathered, is to deliver a methodology that helps all agents, for as little as possible, the gateway to relationships and referral connections across the globe. a true authentic agent attractor.”

And the road ahead runs back to the beginning: the newest work on the roadmap is the referral network itself, built under the name it was imagined with in 2019.

“This is at the core of the spark of the first imaginings of Most Referred Expert.”