An introduction landed because somebody knew two things about me: I worked in commercial real estate data, and I kept looking at mobile-home parks.
The parks were not a random browser tab by then. I had flown to St. Louis after Thanksgiving and spent a weekend driving around to see properties in person. I was still looking through listings across the Midwest and trying to understand what made a good one.
I told the new contact that I hoped to buy one or two within the next year. That was the ambition at the time, not a completed purchase. I was interested because the market seemed inefficient. Information was scattered. Ownership could be hard to follow. Listings did not always tell the useful part of the story.
That overlapped with Reonomy without being a Reonomy project. My day job was built around commercial-property records, ownership, and the problem of making messy real estate data useful. Looking at small parks after work gave me a buyer's version of the same problem. I wanted to know what was actually on the ground, who ran it, and whether the information in front of me was enough to make a decision.
The introduction was to somebody with experience in the category. I asked to talk and learn what he was seeing. We traded a few messages about coffee or drinks, but the thread did not turn into an immediate meeting. It resurfaced later, which is how a lot of these network connections worked.
I did not buy a park that spring. The email is still useful because it catches the idea after the first road trip and before any outcome. I was not only browsing listings. I had a rough plan, a time frame, and a lot of unanswered questions.
The next sensible step was not another spreadsheet. It was to find people who already knew where the spreadsheet was wrong.