Seventy-two homes. Lots backing to a natural wash, views worth the price, and a builder I’d never worked with. I found it by accident, in Tucson, with buyers in the car who didn’t want it.

They had a price point and they’d ruled out Continental Ranch on the far side of I-10, so we went hunting through the smaller communities. I pulled into this one and got excited. My buyers didn’t. They didn’t love the floor plans, they didn’t love the builder, and they moved on. I didn’t. I liked it enough that I eventually bought one of those lots and built a house there.

But the part that stayed with me wasn’t the lot. It was the drive. That neighborhood sat seven minutes from where I already lived. At the same time, I was representing one builder twenty-three minutes out and another thirty-six. Every week I drove past a community I could have owned to go compete in two I didn’t.

Back then the Tucson MLS sold a spiral-bound map book — a hundred pages, glossy cover, every street in the city laid into grids. I loved that book. I carried it everywhere and studied it constantly, before listing appointments, before showings, before anything.

I was reading it wrong. I used it to find my way to places I had already agreed to go.

What I should have done was open to the second page, the one that showed the whole city, and put a star where I lived. Then take a compass — the drawing tool from grade school — and put a circle around the star.

Here is why that circle is worth more than it looks. You don’t drive to a listing once. You drive out for the appointment, back to install the sign, again for the directionals. You drive out to host the open house, meet the inspector, let the contractor in, check on the place after a storm, and pull the signs when it closes. If the seller lives out of state, you’re stopping by every few days just to confirm nothing has gone sideways. A listing isn’t a trip. It’s dozens of them.

Most of us never draw the circle. We take a listing here, a buyer across town, a referral thirty minutes out, another one forty-five. Then we look up and realize half the week went to the windshield, and we call it growth. (I did this for years, and I’ll be honest — I thought I was being ambitious.)

It’s inefficiency in a nicer outfit.

What the map was actually telling me

You don’t need to know the whole market. Consumers don’t hire the agent who knows everything. They hire the agent who knows something extremely well — and geography decides which something.

It is far easier to become known in the place you already live, drive, and shop. You watch the signs go up and come down. You notice which builder is slipping. You hear what people are actually saying about the new development. That kind of knowledge can’t be researched from the other side of the metro, and it compounds every year you stay put.

Study the map before you study the market. Because the neighborhood I had been driving past wasn’t across town. It was seven minutes from home.

One thing to do this week