Ask a land team how they size up a market and you'll usually hear some version of the same answer: closed sales, permit data, and a lot of manual digging. That data is useful, but it's old. A closing reflects a decision a buyer made months ago. A permit shows up after the land deal is done.
In a high-rate market, that lag costs money. Builders are taking land positions years ahead and adjusting prices on finished homes week to week. Being a quarter behind on either one is expensive.
The forward-looking signals already exist. A rezoning shows up on a council agenda. A new subdivision enters entitlement. The builder down the road cuts a price. The problem is that these signals are scattered across agenda packets, county records, and dozens of builder websites. Pulling them together consistently, across every market you care about, has taken a dedicated research team.
Today we're changing that. Prophetic's Market Intelligence now includes two new features, CouncilAI™ and Live Homebuilder Inventory. Together with DevMap®, they cover the full timeline of a market, all in the platform land teams already use to find land, so your team can make smarter land decisions and protect your margins.
CouncilAI: the earliest signal in land acquisition
Every rezoning, subdivision, and site plan starts in a public meeting. That makes local government the earliest place to see what's coming, if you can keep up with it.
CouncilAI reads agendas and minutes and identifies the proposals and decisions that matter to developers. For each one, it captures the key details:
- Applicant
- Zoning change
- Acreage
- Vote
- Outcome
Then it pins the event to the affected parcel, with every field linked back to the source document. You see a project at its first hearing, months before permits, listings, or news, and you never have to open a PDF.
A few things make CouncilAI different:
- Coverage at scale. CouncilAI covers more than 3,500 governing bodies and adds new coverage every week.
- It finds the parcel even when the filing doesn't. Plenty of agenda items have no address or parcel number. CouncilAI can still place most new development events on the map.
- It looks beyond city hall. City and county agendas are a strong leading indicator, but they aren't the only one. CouncilAI also pulls in planning and zoning commissions, utilities boards, environmental review boards, and other bodies whose decisions can come before a city or county vote.
Live Homebuilder Inventory: what's for sale, and at what price, right now
On the other end of the timeline is the question every builder asks about a finished home: what's the competition doing on price?
Until now, answering that meant checking a dozen builder sites by hand every week. Live Homebuilder Inventory replaces that with a single, current view of new-home supply:
- More than 65,000 for-sale new homes from the top 50+ homebuilder brands, across all 50 states
- Tens of thousands of homes never listed on MLS, so you see supply that traditional sources miss
- Per-home and development-level views of price cuts, incentives, and inventory
- Prices rechecked frequently, so a cut shows up within days, not in next quarter's closings
The result: builders can price their own homes with confidence in a fast-moving market. Live Homebuilder Inventory is available now for Prophetic Expert and Enterprise clients.
DevMap ties it together
Both features build on DevMap, Prophetic's national map of new residential subdivisions and multifamily developments. DevMap tracks more than 164,000 subdivisions and 32,000+ multifamily projects from entitlement through completion.
Put together, the picture looks like this:
- CouncilAI shows what's being proposed and decided, often years before a project breaks ground.
- DevMap tracks each project as it moves from entitlement to completion.
- Live Homebuilder Inventory shows what's for sale today and how pricing is moving week by week.
Why this matters for land teams
"Land teams are some of the sharpest people in this business, but they’ve been fighting with a hand tied behind their back when it comes to current and complete market data," said Oliver Alexander, Founder and CEO of Prophetic. "They deserve to see what’s happening in their markets as it happens. When a rezoning hits a council agenda or a competitor cuts a price, they should know that today, not next quarter. CouncilAI and Live Homebuilder Inventory were built to solve these problems, so good teams can finally get ahead of a market instead of chasing it.”
For many teams, the biggest change is capacity. Patrick Achilles, Land Acquisition Manager at Drees Homes, put it this way: "I don't have someone to go find all of this for me, the council votes, what's entering entitlement, what the builder down the road just did on price. Seeing it all on one map is a force multiplier. We vet properties far faster than before, and I don't have to hire anyone to do it."
Working from records local governments already publish, CouncilAI delivers the kind of insight that used to require a large research team, and it delivers it faster.
See it on your markets
CouncilAI and Live Homebuilder Inventory are available now on Expert and Enterprise plans
The best way to understand CouncilAI and Live Homebuilder Inventory is to see them on the markets you're working in. Schedule a walkthrough and we'll show you what's moving right now.
