Jimmy Bagley, CFO at City Homes, runs land acquisition for a builder-developer working from Pigeon Forge to Southwest Florida to the Orlando-Tampa corridor. A year ago he made a simple bet: stop fighting over listed deals and go find the 98% of land that never hits the market. It worked. 

In the team's first year on Prophetic, the results stacked up fast:

• 23% response rate on off-market outreach, against an industry norm of 1 to 2%
• ~$3 million in committed capital off a single campaign in one community
• 20 deals closed, 15 more under option in year one
• Under 60 days to close the strongest deals
• 364 available lots surfaced in a community his team had worked for 15+ years and figured held 150.

Here are ten things worth stealing from how his team did it.

1. The old way of finding land was hopelessly fragmented. "The word I would use is fragmented," Jimmy says. Three subscriptions, five newsletters, a team driving sites with a map and a list, and half the research trapped on one person's desktop while the other half sat on someone else's. Nothing was centralized, and most of the work was just compiling.

2. You're competing for 2% of the market and ignoring the other 98%. There are roughly 160 million parcels of land in the country, and at any given moment only about 1 to 2% are on the market. "You're letting 1 to 2% of the market control your destiny." The teams that are winning today go after the rest.

3. One search can turn into millions in committed capital. Working a single submarket in SearchAI™, Jimmy's team drew a polygon and pulled 384 parcels that fit, about 200 of them strong. Off that one campaign, in that one community, they committed roughly $3 million in capital. "It's been a tremendous product for us," Jimmy says.

4. Put the cash offer right in the letter. The team skip-traced owners, targeted the ones who had held land a long time and lived out of state, and sent handwritten letters with one twist: the actual cash offer was in the letter. The response rate was 23%, against an industry norm of 1 to 2%. "We got people to pick up the phone pretty quickly when they knew what they could get right away."

5. Off-market deals close fast. A cash offer to an owner who wasn't expecting one moves quickly. "The really strong ones we were excited about early, all of them were within 60 days." In year one, that meant 20 closed and another 15 under option.

6. You don't know your market as well as you think. Jimmy's team had worked one 6,000-unit community for more than 15 years. He asked them how many lots were still available. They guessed 150. The platform found 364. "It was crazy how confidently misinformed we were," he says. "I implore anybody who thinks they know their market: run it through."

7. The scale is bigger than most teams imagine. Once you open up off-market hunting, the volume is staggering. It's not unusual for Prophetic users to screen 5,000 to 15,000 off-market parcels per user, per month. The constraint stops being how much land you can find and becomes how well you can manage it.

8. When the owner calls back, you have 30 seconds to look like you know the deal. Send hundreds of letters and the calls come back at random. The difference between winning that call and losing it is being able to pull up the parcel, the notes, and the history in under 30 seconds. That instant recall is what keeps a landowner's trust on the phone.

9. You can see every subdivision, and who's building it. With DevMap, one click on a project shows the whole picture: 946 total lots, the builders involved (D.R. Horton, Clayton, NVR, Stanley Martin), how many are active, pending, and closed, and the sales pace, all pulled from MLS. It turns a monthly drive-around into a few seconds of research.

10. The technology doesn't replace the land pro. It multiplies them. This is the part that matters most. "There is always going to be a human element to this," Jimmy says. "It just makes every person on staff more efficient." The platform finds the parcels and keeps the pipeline straight. Knocking on the door, building the trust, and closing the deal is still the work of a skilled team, now free to do far more of it.

Not all of these tools are the same, and he'd know

Before committing, his team tried the alternatives in earnest. "We looked at a bunch, tried, and paid for a lot," he says. What set Prophetic apart wasn't any single feature, it was that everything lived in one place. "Outside of Prophetic, I don't think there's the completeness: dashboard, efficiency, data, search, SiteAI, DevMap, all the things you do as a land team. Prophetic's by far the best at accomplishing those tasks."

Watch the full conversation with Jimmy Bagley, then book a demo to see it on your market.