Real estate development is often described as a hyper local business. You need local relationships and you need to understand the nuances of your market so that you can identify opportunities and best manage your risks. This is all true. New buildings don't exist in a vacuum; they are the result of land use policies, politics, economic conditions, culture, and countless other very specific factors. So when capital invests with a local "sponsor", they are expecting that developer to have the knowledge and experience to navigate all of these local risk factors.
At the same time, the world is only getting smaller and more interconnected. The result is that there are many things that aren't actually different across markets. For example, I find it interesting that, today, you can speak to a developer on the other side of the world and for it to feel like they're living the same life: "yeah, so, office vacancies are up (though we're looking at conversions), residential demand is down (individual investors have left the market), but there's still demand for student housing and distribution centers." On some level, we are all living and operating in the same market.
So perhaps a better way to think about real estate development is that it's both local, and global. And you need to be able to operate at all of the different scales in between. You need to worry about what's happening down the street and the R-value of your wall assemblies in the context of your local climate, but you also need to think about the macro environment. And this is likely to become only more true as time goes on and as new technologies continue to bring us closer.
