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I do have a physical office.   My current set up has a main hub site of domain.com and pages with cities on them and then "neighborhoods" further in.

I would normally never opt for a niche site but I've never had the luxury of an exact keyword match before.  The city itself is large enough (enough content) to stand on it's own - so it's just the effort it would take to get it up on it's own.

I think I answered my own question.  In instances like this if I have the resources then it's worth it only if the city is large enough.   If I was in Texas for example and had Texashomes.com - wouldn't it make sense to have Austinhomes and dallashomes as well and build those out?

Thanks for your response!

That's easy then.  Of course.  Technically you see this on every search result... period.  Every site there is somehow ranking for the same keywords.  Real estate you see this all the time.  Do a search for [Your City] Real Estate or "Homes" and you'll see 5 to 10 results that have nearly the same content on their landing page.

For me it depends on the design.  The search engine robot gobbles text or code if you will in order.  So if there's no other content in the way and it's a page full of links then either one will do.  The first link gets the most juice but they all get divided by the number of links.  So while it may be a good idea to do a site map of sorts it's not necessarily boosting your site as much as it is helping to map it.  Since you didn't say it was a sitemap directly, then I'd say design it for google & people.

Since there's no content, I don't really think it matters.