how to find opportunities in your local market: talk to whoever is already building

last week i taped with a real estate developer who got into the business the hard way. she was installing signs. she walked up to a developer and asked for a job. twenty years later she's built hundreds of projects... most people in that career build five to ten.

but the part of her story that stayed with me happened after hurricane ian hit florida in 2022.

the beach town she knew was wiped out. three days later she biked in to see it.

what she found wasn't only physical damage. it was a math problem. she said insurance for hurricane and surge in florida was capped at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, no matter what the building was worth. the rebuild was estimated at ten to fifteen years.

so who rebuilds?

outside developers showed up. they bought four acres for fifty million dollars to put up seventeen story luxury towers. good for them. but the people who lived there year round got left out of the conversation.

"the locals who live here year round and not just the january through april snowbirds, the locals then get overlooked."

so she started a program to teach locals to become the developers themselves.

i asked her how someone finds the real opportunities in their local market. not the brochure version. the real one.

her answer was two moves.

first, talk to your community officials. they'll show you the plan. the zoning, the vision, what the town wants to be in ten years.

second, and this is the one most people skip... find whoever is already building. city planners show you the future they hope for. the people pouring concrete right now show you what's happening today. what's getting permitted, what's stuck, what's selling, what nobody wants.

the plan is a forecast. the builder is the score.

she said the locals have the advantage outsiders don't. "they know what's missing. they know what's needed."

she told me about competing business owners in one town who formed a coalition. they meet once a month and work together to drive foot traffic. rivals on paper, partners on main street. because an empty street hurts everyone more than a competitor ever could.

and she made a point about scale that i didn't expect. there are more than sixteen thousand communities in the us with under ten thousand people. most of them will never make a headline. most of them have the same gap between the plan and what's happening on the ground.

what struck me is that she didn't wait for permission. she didn't wait for the plan to be finished or for the insurance math to get better. she went to the people who were already there and asked them what was missing. then she built a way for them to fill the gap themselves.

this isn't only a real estate lesson.

every founder i talk to wants to know where the opportunity is. they read reports. they watch the analysts. they study what the big players say they're going to do.

that's the city planner view. useful, but it's the future somebody hopes for.

the builder view is who's shipping in your space right now. who's hiring. who's getting customers and who's quietly shutting down. you get that by calling them, not by reading about them.

the people already building are the cheapest market research you'll ever get. and most of them will talk to you if you ask about their work instead of pitching yours.

that's half the reason i run the show. every week i get to sit with people who are building right now, and they tell me what's real. if you're one of them, come on the show.

so who in your market is already building... and when was the last time you asked them what they're seeing?