Our realtor was with the same firm as the sellers agent. Most people working in real estate know each other - its a small club here grouped by town/ neighborhood you are searching in. Everyone is also less than competent because the market here is always so strong despite recessions - you can look at real estate data locally online and instead of dipping in 2008 like most major cities boston kind of remained flat on the whole.

after a few months of searching for single families and getting outbid, we had told our agent we were done. He mentioned the building was breaking ground to me anyways, and was doing pre-construction financing to help with costs and also make the case to the developers’ bank that people would buy in (were in metro bosto so I’m sure that wasn’t hard) Buying in early meant we wouldn’t deal with a bidding war or having to write letters to owners to convince them to pick us, which made us uncomfortable as POC. The risks to us were construction delays, losing our mortgage approval bc of getting timed out or job loss etc., or the building going under for whatever reason. We would be out our 10% deposit in that case which for us was already was less than the cost of “bidding” for a single family if that makes sense

You can also stalk city zoning boards and city council meetings for updates on new zoning approvals for buildings. More work obviously but the info is all out there for the taking - hope this helps!! Sorry for the novel lol