One Location, Targeting Multiple Cities

My wife and I run a small Real Estate Team in a small city outside of Phoenix Arizona. We have come to dominate that city in the Google Map Pack for like 40-50 keyword (#1 for most of those), organically over the last 5 years. We are now wanting to expand, create a new website, new team, and new GBP for about 5 neighboring cities up near the Phoenix area.

My concern is building out the site and the Profile in a manner to dominate those 5 cities as much as we possibly can without having to have office space in each city. Regarding the website, I'm not sure how to go about structuring the on-page SEO to be able to generate organic rankings in the SERPs from each of these cities. I think I can rank well in the Map Pack for all of these cities by going with an SAB. The GBP is the least of my worries.

We can send all of our clients to this new profile to leave reviews to help with increasing Map Pack rankings. I guess my question is, if our office is location in one of these cities, should we focus the homepage primarily on the city the office is located in and just have landing pages for the other cities, or should we attempt to rank the homepage for all of the cities?

If you're running everything off a single domain, you can organize the structure of your pages to target specific cities, and then link to each subpage in the respective GBP. Example:

yourteam.cm/phoenix
yourteam.cm/scottsdale

Each GBP profile would link to either yourteam.cm/phoenix or yourteam.cm/scottsdale, and then your offpage SEO efforts will compound results to that single domain. This is very common for national franchises so you have ample evidence this works in practice.

yes but national franchises are completely different business. in my case it wouldn't be

Focus the homepage on your main office location, then create landing pages optimized for the other target cities. Make sure to dial in the local SEO on those landing pages.

I've been speaking to a supposed SEO expert from upwork.com and he is saying that he recommends I focus the homepage on all of the cities, which is known as The East Valley, and do landing pages for all of the other cities. Would that be a bad idea? If so why?

I know we have some real SEO pros here—your expertise is exactly what this topic needs. I'd genuinely value the insight only someone with your level of knowledge can provide. Don’t hold back; your input could make all the difference!