A Senior Investment Analyst at a Commercial Industrial Development Firm, shares his first week with Prophetic and how it transformed a slow, manual sourcing process into a targeted outreach engine.
I source and underwrite industrial outdoor storage properties for a living. It is one of the more specialized corners of commercial real estate, and the supply keeps shrinking. Cities prefer higher tax revenue uses. Land gets rezoned. The properties that support truck and fleet storage, logistics, contractor yards, and last-mile distribution are increasingly rare, and demand for them has never been higher as e-commerce drives the need for more infill distribution points.
The challenge is that finding these properties means knowing exactly which zoning codes permit outdoor storage, and those codes are different in every city. That research lived in municipal databases that were built for planning departments, not investment analysts moving fast across multiple markets.
Confirming zoning was slow and full of dead ends. Every deal that came across my desk required navigating city resources to verify permitted uses. New markets were the hardest. There was no shortcut. I was spending time that should have gone to evaluating and pursuing properties on just determining whether they were even worth a closer look.
Evaluating and screening deals was labor-intensive. Beyond zoning, screening comparable properties and confirming viability required extensive manual verification before a site could be taken seriously. The process was slow by design, not because it needed to be.
Entering new markets lacked speed and confidence. Without a reliable way to surface properties that already matched my criteria, prospecting a market I didn’t already know well meant building everything from scratch. That limited how quickly we could move.
"We looked at every PropTech provider out there. Prophetic is bar none the best we've seen. No other platform comes close on zoning accuracy or permitted uses and that is the market standard we were looking for."
In the first week, the workflow changed in three meaningful ways.
SearchAI™ Intentions surfaces properties by what you want to build, not by zoning codes you have to know yourself. Rather than researching which codes allow outdoor storage market by market and cross-referencing each site manually, I filter by my development intent and Prophetic surfaces the viable properties. Minimum lot size, coverage requirements, and development type combine into a search that returns qualified candidates instantly. In Phoenix, that used to mean navigating city systems. Now it means a usable list before I have finished my coffee.
Building a target list across multiple markets now takes minutes, not days. I put together a prospect list of roughly 100 properties across the Central Valley covering Stockton, Modesto, and Merced. We were making calls to landowners within days of getting on the platform.
Owner contact information surfaces at the parcel level the moment you need it. The instant a property looks worth pursuing, Prophetic surfaces the owner's phone number and email, including contacts tied to LLCs multiple layers deep. No separate database, no manual lookup, no hours spent before the first call. Our team is now making outreach calls entirely from the contacts that Prophetic is surfacing.
"It’s like having an additional team member. The speed at which we can filter deals now is just night and day."
We are already in conversations with owners who have never been approached as potential sellers. Within the first week, our team was on the phone with target property owners we identified through Prophetic. The path is clear. We are reaching owners in markets we could not have found this quickly before.
The platform effectively adds a dedicated team member for zoning research. The volume of zoning verification that used to consume hours of my time is now handled by the platform. I am not stuck in city documents. I am evaluating, deciding, and moving.
We are operating with an advantage most competitors in this space do not know exists. In industrial outdoor storage, the properties are rare and the window to move on them is short. Having intelligence that surfaces the right opportunities faster, and puts us in front of owners before anyone else does, is our new advantage.
"It almost doesn't feel like AI. That's how accurate and seamless it is. It feels above AI. And our competitors are not using anything like this."
