A full land acquisition team, working the traditional way, covers 360 to 600 parcels in a quarter. Last quarter on Prophetic, a group of land professionals each screened 5,715 on their own.
The shift in how land teams find, analyze, organize and win land is accelerating. The teams that have made it are pulling farther ahead, with the top users on Prophetic working roughly ten times the ground an entire land department could reach the old way.
And the number of individuals outworking entire teams is growing. Last quarter, 419 individual users each screened more than a full traditional team covers in the same period. This is the kind of advantage that drives an entire industry to change how it works.
See what the 50 most active land professionals on the platform, ranked by parcels screened, are doing. These per-person figures are what one individual produced in three months.
At roughly 1,900 parcels a month per person against a full team’s 120 to 200, this is not the old job done faster. It is a different job.
The obvious assumption is that these people search harder than everyone else. But that’s not the case. The median member of the group ran twelve searches during the quarter. Fewer than one per week.
What separates them is what happens after each search. They then work parcels all the way through a process to see what is worth moving or passing on. They analyze them, check the constraints, build them into a pipeline, and reach out to the owners.
That shows up clearly in how much of the platform they are each using. The median member of the group runs six of the seven parts of the process. 60% of them run six or more. 34% run the full process.
For a generation the ceiling forced a quiet compromise. You could only cover a fraction of what was out there, so you pre-filtered on instinct and worked parcel by parcel, hoping the best deal was in the slice you had time for. Running the whole process on every parcel ends that compromise.
The group is not just covering more ground. It is growing, and the rate is accelerating.
Adoption is not plateauing after the early wins. Every measure moved up, and the number of people producing at this level nearly doubled across two quarters.
The clearest pattern in this quarter’s data is also the most useful one, because it is something anyone can act on. Output rises with every additional part of the process a person runs.
Every additional step up roughly doubles the ground that a person covers. The biggest single jump is from one part to two, which is where the steepest return sits for anyone currently working in one corner of the platform.
Now I can spend my time vetting, not hunting.
- Valerie Mangum, Director of ERP at M/I Homes
None of this replaces the expert. It amplifies them. The judgment that separates a great land buyer from an average one matters more now, not less. The difference is that their expertise can now be applied across the whole market instead of just a sliver.
A reaction like “that cannot be real” is fair.
Nobody covers ten times what a full land department reaches by working harder or buying better data.
And that is the point. You cannot get here from a GIS viewer, a stack of zoning PDFs and a spreadsheet. You cannot get here by looking up addresses one at a time with an AI agent either, no matter how fast it moves. And you cannot get here from the current generation of land tools, which is where this quarter’s data says something useful.
The market has good data now. There are platforms with strong parcel records, comps, ownership, clean maps, fast search, some with an AI chat box layered on top. Most of them do some of this work well. The clearest finding in this quarter’s numbers is that working the full process is where the gains are.
WHAT THE DATA ACTUALLY SHOWS A person running one part of the process screens a median of 24 parcels in a quarter. A person running all seven screens 1,182. Fifty times the ground, and it never plateaus. No single capability, however good, closes that gap.
The ceiling was never one missing feature. It was that the work was split across tools that did not know about each other, so every parcel became a question somebody had to sit down and answer with a stitched together process. That friction is the ceiling, and a better tool for one part does not raise it.
Seeing the whole market is half of it. The other half is running the whole process on every parcel that matters to you, in one place, for as long as it matters.
That is what the 50 most active land professionals in this business are doing, and it is why each one of them now covers what a department used to. They are not working the same slice faster. They are working whole markets, and carrying every parcel in them all the way through. And the impact of this is more deals, more awareness in the market, and more growth for their business.
If your competitors adopt this first, it is already too late. The land contacts they make through it are contacts you will never get.
- Alexx Monastiero, Principal and Director of Land Acquisition at The Gove Group Real Estate, LLC
The ceiling that defined this job for a generation is gone. What replaces it is open to any team willing to run the whole process instead of a piece of it, and over the next few years it is what will separate the teams that grow from the teams that do not.
See what your team could do with the ceiling lifted. [Book a demo]
About this report
The same method as the previous two. We take the 50 land professionals with the highest parcel volume in the quarter, ranked by individual rather than by company, and look at what they did. Internal, test and monitoring accounts are removed before ranking. Per-user figures in the top-50 tables are means, consistent with prior quarters. The process ladder uses medians, because a small number of very high-volume individuals would otherwise misrepresent what a typical person at each level achieves. The traditional benchmark of 120 to 200 parcels a month for a full team is the same one used in previous reports. Seven parts of the process are counted: search, zoning research, yield studies, constraint review, pipeline, owner research and outreach. No person, company or organization is identified.
Highest single-user totals are not reported this quarter. Several of last quarter’s records were set by an individual who left their company partway through Q3, which makes a single-user comparison misleading rather than informative. Daily use rate is also omitted, because the current export produces values above 100% for some users and the calculation needs correcting before publication.
