Alan Sestito — Principal, SES Residential
I launched a business built around acquiring and brokering land, and I launched it into the slowest market in a decade.
SES Residential is two businesses. On the acquisition side we buy infill lots and teardowns to put new construction on, and on the brokerage side we represent landowners selling to larger builders and developers. We have been in the Charlotte market since 2020.
The challenge is the conversation. You have landowners who were given offers in 2021 and 2022 that are no longer realistic, and they still have that number in their head. You have to work with them to understand the process and where you need to be for it to make sense.
And before any of that, you have to get to them.
We tried everything. Mailers, SMS blasts, lists from a variety of providers. The owner data was never reliable, and the owners we did reach had already been worn down by everyone else working the same list.
What I did not realize until later is that we were also only ever seeing part of our market. I was working whatever the lists gave us and whatever I came across driving around. I thought I knew this market but I was only looking at a fraction of it.
"Most of the industry pulls from the same two or three tools, so we're all mailing the same people, and those owners are completely over it."
I watched Prophetic for over a year before we signed, and what got me off the fence was that it kept getting better the whole time I was watching.
Search the entire market by what we buy. Foreclosures. Vacant lots. Large acreage. Infill parcels from a quarter acre to five acres in the ZIP codes we want. Whatever our buy box is that week, I search against it rather than against what happens to be listed. Even when a search returns twenty-five results, those twenty-five are real opportunities rather than a list that wastes my time.
Find parcels other tools miss. Next week I am walking a property with an owner who answered our second letter. It is in a neighborhood we have been actively hunting in, and I have driven through it hundreds of times. I have scoured GIS. It never came up until Prophetic found it. There are opportunities hiding in plain sight, and nobody else is looking at them.
Reach the owner with contact data that works. The skip tracing is insanely accurate. Mailing addresses, emails, phone numbers. I send one letter, wait about a week, and send a second, and that second touch is where most of our responses come from. Owners tell us they got the first one and were not sure we were serious.
Run the whole process in one system. I used to go from one system to something else to something else. Now the map, the letters, and the contacts are all in one place. When an owner calls back, I pull up the record and the notes are already there, including the underwriting I did before we ever reached out.
"I have every opportunity in the Charlotte market at my disposal in Prophetic. Figure out what you want, put it in, and it comes back with the results. It's honestly that simple."
Sixty days in, we are bringing on help. I have a meeting Monday to interview people to support lead generation and keep everything organized. We have gotten spread too thin, which is not where I expected to be considering the current market conditions.
A down cycle creates buying opportunity. There are always people trading real estate, no matter where the cycle is. It has shifted from a seller's market to a buyer's market. There is less competition. There is more inventory, so sellers are more motivated. Prophetic is giving us the ability to grow while everyone else is on the sidelines.
We have time to be selective. Competing against multiple buyers means taking whatever you can get. With fewer bidders in the market, we have time to underwrite properly, walk away from the ones that do not work, and push on the ones that do.
We reach owners before anyone else does. Because we are working off the whole market rather than the same list everyone buys, we are often the first to contact an owner. That changes the conversation entirely. They are not abrasive, their guard is down, and even when it does not lead to a deal it leads to one we can keep nurturing.
Prophetic paid for itself quickly. The revenue we will bring in makes the subscription look very small.
“There are always people trading real estate, no matter where the cycle is. Prophetic is my chance to grow while everyone else is on the sidelines.”
