Big dilemma: having everything under the same domain or getting multiple EMD?

Found a niche for local lead gen.
Final goal is rent the local pages to local biz.

Decided to create a blog on the niche because there's lots of search queries with good traffic unanswered and that can really make this site the number one authority in the country, hence get the top spots.

Dilemma:

A) Create landing pages under the the main site domain (blog) targeting the cities

or

B) Buy the EMD, having the optimized landing pages there and link from the blog to those (should pass authority); this way might be better due to the strength of a EMD (exact match domain)

Really not sure which of the two ways is the better to reach my goal.

Either cases I'm thinking of buying the EMD just to be sure.

If you're targeting national, it might be better to break sites out based on each area unless you have deep pockets and resources to try and rank a single brand site everywhere. If its just a local area, use 1 site with individual town or city pages.