Everyone here agrees the best deal is the one almost nobody sees. The pocket listing, the broker who calls you before the CIM is even formatted. Earning that phone call takes years of relationship work, and the searchers who do it deserve the edge. I want to float a hypothesis about a second tier of hidden inventory, one that's hiding in plain sight. I've started calling them Outposts: small broker websites carrying fewer than 20 listings that don't syndicate anywhere. The deals never reach BizBuySell or any aggregator. They live on the firm's own website and go out to the firm's own email list, and that's it. The scraper I built for Searcher OS watches 30 aggregator boards and 253 individual broker sites, so I pulled 4 months of data (roughly 68,800 listings) to test whether the Outpost idea holds up. What came back: - 149 of the 253 broker sites are Outposts. Together they carried 1,153 deals over the 4 months. - About 90% of those deals never appeared anywhere else in my data. Not on a board, not on another broker's site. That number held whether I drew the line at 10, 20, or 30 listings per site, so it isn't an artifact of where I cut it. - That's roughly 60 businesses a week, each visible on exactly 1 small website. - They skew bigger than I expected. Median asking price on Outpost listings are 50% larger than the big aggregator sites. Honest sizing: this is under 2% of total listing volume. Nobody is missing half the market. But the competition math is what interests me. A new listing on BizBuySell gets refreshed by every searcher in the country before breakfast. A listing on a 12-listing regional broker site gets seen by that broker's email list and whoever happens to wander past. My theory on why this tier exists: small regional brokers have the owner relationships but don't pay to syndicate. So the deal sits where the broker put it, working roughly the way a pocket listing works, except it's technically public. I got pulled far enough down this rabbit hole that I now write up the best Outposts I find each week in a free email I call The Prospect. AI individually reviews each listing that went live that week and scores the top potential deals for my review. A few of the picks have surprised me. So here's the conversation I'm hoping for. Has anyone actually sourced (or closed) a deal from one of these tiny broker sites? And for the brokers here: if you run a small shop and don't syndicate, what's the reasoning? I'm long the thesis but short on closed-deal proof, so check me.