Most owners have the town picked before they ask anyone to look at it. Usually the pick isn't careless, and often it isn't even wrong. It just hasn't been checked against anything.
I trained as a scientist before I ever worked in marketing, and the habit that carried over is that I don't trust a conclusion I can't show the work behind. So rather than argue the point in the abstract, here is what the check looks like worked all the way through, and what happens when it disagrees with a gut that has earned its confidence.
A hypothetical: the town that was already picked
Picture an owner, Angela, who runs a roofing company and has already settled on a town called Brant for her second base. She says it the way people say things they have stopped questioning. The market read is, in her mind, a formality.
The pick isn't careless. Her sister has lived in Brant for a decade. Angela knows which roads ice over first, which subdivision is full of aging cedar-shake roofs, where the good breakfast is. When you know a place in your body like that, it feels like knowledge, and a lot of the time it is. A hunch built on ten years of driving those streets earns some respect.
It just hasn't been checked against anything.
What the first read actually does
The job in that conversation isn't to talk an owner out of her gut. It's to set numbers down next to it. Familiarity is a real input. It's just one of them, and it tends to crowd out the others because it arrives with feelings already attached.
So the read covers Brant, and because you always look at the neighbors, the four towns ringing it. Housing age and turnover on one side, which is the replacement-roof pipeline. Who is already working the area on the other, and how dug in they are.
Brant comes back fine. Not bad, not remarkable: steady demand, and a set of competitors who have been there a while and have the reviews to prove it. Delmar comes back better. And Delmar is a town Angela named exactly once, in passing, as "the other direction."
The number that turns it
Delmar has the older housing stock, the kind that keeps generating roof work whether or not anyone is advertising into it. It also has thinner competition, and the roofers it does have are newer and scattered rather than sitting on top of the addresses that matter. Brant's roofers have a fifteen-year head start on the map. Delmar's don't. Density, not a raw count of who's out there, is most of the gap, and it points the opposite way from the hunch.
An owner in Angela's position almost goes with Brant anyway, and it's hard to blame her. Her sister is there. The idea of driving somewhere she only half-knows, to compete for customers she'd have to win off people already holding the ground, is less comfortable than the town where she already knows the diner. Comfort is a quiet thumb on the scale, and it decides more of these than anyone admits.
What changes the call isn't a speech. It's the two columns side by side. The gap stops being abstract the moment it's on the page: same trucks, same crews, same money, aimed at a town where the ground is more open.
The part worth keeping
Brant wouldn't have been a disaster. That is the awkward thing about hunches in this business: they're usually not wrong, so nothing forces you to test them. It would have been the second-best town, chosen with complete confidence, and she'd never have known Delmar was the better call, because ad reports and slow months don't come labeled with the road you didn't take.
Numbers settle arguments a hunch can't. Not because the gut is dumb, but because the gut only knows the towns you already know. The demand-and-competition read that tells you which adjacent town to pick knows the ones you drive past without a second look.
The scenario above is illustrative, not a client story. The method behind it is the real part: housing age and turnover for the demand side, competitor density rather than competitor count for the other, run across a town and the ring around it, so the comparison you're making is between real alternatives instead of between one town and no town at all.