At PCBC this year, I shared the Innovation Stage with Dennis Schroeder and Ger'rell King, who run land acquisition for Shea Homes. Shea is one of the largest homebuilders in the country, family owned for generations, with more than 2,600 closings a year and land teams spread from the Carolinas to Southern California.
During the session I asked Dennis and Ger'rell to talk about how AI is changing how they work. Here’s what they shared.
Killing the wrong deals in minutes, not weeks
Dennis started with the shift in how fast his team can walk away from a bad parcel. "We used to go in, analyze the parcel, see if it was viable, and only then decide," he said. "Now we log in and ask, what does the environmental look like, what does the fire risk look like, are there other hurdles? If it's not a piece for us, we cross it off and move to the next deal." The time difference, in his words: "Minutes to an hour to cross something off, versus a week or two in the past."
That matters more than it sounds. There are roughly 160 million parcels in this country, and at any given moment about 98% of them are off the market. The teams that win are the ones who can rule land in or out fast enough to actually work at that scale.
The deals that boomerang back
Ger'rell added a detail I loved. Crossing a deal off is not the same as forgetting it. "Even if we cross a deal off, six months or a year later it tends to come back," he said. "I call them boomerang deals." The trick is keeping tabs so a returning deal never catches you off guard, and for that he leans on the pipeline. "My favorite thing about Prophetic is the pipeline. I take notes during a call with a broker or a seller and save them to the project, so I can recall any conversation we had. When I'm back on the phone, I always have the details to know what I'm talking about." When you are tracking hundreds of parcels, that instant recall is often the difference between holding a landowner's attention and losing them to the next caller.
A site plan that built trust
Dennis told a great story about turning a fuzzy negotiation into a real one. A broker brought him an opportunity, and the two sides did not agree on what the site could actually hold. "I used Prophetic's SiteAI™ to lay out the site plan, the bio basins, the parks," he said. "It had a lot of slopes, so I could cross out that acreage. You might have 20 acres, but really only 13 of it is developable." In about half an hour he generated a plan with roughly 250 lots across four product types, enough to write a realistic offer instead of a thumb-in-the-air guess.
The quieter win was trust. When you can sit with a landowner and show them exactly where the topography forces your hand and what that means for yield, you stop being a number on a page and become the team they believe in. The proof came from the other side of the table. As Dennis put it, "At the end of the call, their analyst asked, can we get that software?"
Finding the dirt no one else saw
Ger'rell's story showed how one lead becomes many. "I got an OM on one parcel, and I like to look at the surrounding neighborhood to get a feel for it," he said. "So I put some search filters on to see what was vacant or underutilized nearby. I found about four acres, looked up the owner, did some skip tracing, and cold called the family. Surprisingly enough, no other builder had contacted them." That one call turned into an LOI, and then into something bigger: the family's parents had been land investors with a whole portfolio, so the conversation expanded well beyond the original four acres. An inbound broker lead had quietly become a proactive off-market find, which is exactly how this is supposed to work. The technology does not replace your brokers. It lets you do more around them.
Why Shea chose Prophetic and how it’s different
I asked Dennis why Shea landed on Prophetic after being pitched by plenty of platforms. "We were approached about a year and a half ago and looked at several," he said. "It came down to ease of use, and the fact that Prophetic let us test it. A lot of the others wouldn't. We fell in love with it and took it to our corporate team." What has kept them there is responsiveness. He described submitting an enhancement request and seeing it shipped within two weeks. Real estate data is imperfect by nature, so the thing that actually matters over time is whether your partner shows up and fixes what needs fixing.
Is it the new table stakes or just a nice-to-have?
Both of them landed in the same place. "I can't imagine going back to searching tens of websites, pulling reports, spending all those hours," Dennis said. "It was an arduous process, fraught with error." Ger'rell framed it around focus: doing the work efficiently instead of manually with spreadsheets and paper, and avoiding what he called deal merge, when you are juggling so many opportunities they blur together. "Prophetic lets you keep that separation and stay on point."
What to take away from this
I closed by asking each of them for the one thing they would want people to take away. Dennis, deadpan: "If you're one of my competitor homebuilders, stay away." Ger'rell, after the laughter: "Know what you're looking for. Start with the end in mind and work backwards. I call it a Swiss Army knife. Whatever your goal is, start there."
That is the part I never get tired of. Not what the software can do in a demo, but what a land team does with it when the stakes are real. As Dennis said, you do not see the value in three years when the home delivers. You see it the day you win the deal.
Watch the full recorded session
See it on your own market. https://www.propheticsoftware.ai/demo
