They'd Driven Past It a Hundred Times. Prophetic Found It in Seconds.

Webinar Recap: Inside The Gove Group's first year on Prophetic.

Written by:

Scott Townsend, Sr. Director of Marketing at Prophetic

Alexx Monastiero has been finding land in New Hampshire for over a decade. She knows her market. She drives the neighborhoods. She works the tax maps.

And yet there was a $700,000 lot sitting in one of the most desirable coastal towns in her area, in a neighborhood she knew well that she had never found.

Prophetic found it on the first search.

That single lot, now under development, will more than pay for the entire cost of the platform. And it almost never happened.

The Old Way Was Embarrassing (Her Words)

Alexx is the Principal and Director of Land Acquisition at The Gove Group, a residential developer in New Hampshire and Maine that builds 300 to 500 units per year. Before Prophetic, finding off-market land meant opening a GIS map, zooming into one corner of a town, and manually scrolling, parcel by parcel, across the entire area.

"It's sort of embarrassing to recount, really," she said. "You're going parcel by parcel, creating a list of maybe 50 parcels, then going to each of those other resources and checking a box. Is it in a residential zone? Does it have wetlands? And so we're sort of filtering down from that manual list creation."

One town. One week. About 30% of her working hours, just for the search.

And when she was done, she had an Excel spreadsheet with no live data. Zoning could change. Ownership could shift. The list degraded the moment she saved it.

Then there was the landowner follow-up problem.

When someone called back months, sometimes years after receiving a letter, Alexx had no context. No notes. No quick way to pull up the parcel while they waited on the line.

"There's this gut-drop feeling," she said. "I'm searching through my Excel spreadsheets trying to find Kristen from Fremont to see what parcel of land she has."

The Decision to Change

Alexx first saw Prophetic at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas. She stopped at the booth, walked away, and came back ten more times.

Her initial skepticism was reasonable: In New England each town has its own zoning. Steep slopes, wetlands, and fragmented data sources make the market genuinely complicated. Could software like Prophetic actually work here?

The Prophetic team proved it could. They pulled real parcels from her market, showed her live data, and let her verify what she already knew was true before asking her to trust what she didn't.

"Seeing is believing," she said. "We're able to go to 123 Main Street. I know what the zoning is, I know who the owner is. Can you show me that it's right? And they were able to do that for us."

What pushed her over the line was simpler: the cost of waiting.

"If our competitors down the street decide to take the jump and do this before we do, they're going to get the first stab at all of the leads. If we wait six months, that's six months of lost opportunity."

What Changed After Deployment

The Gove Group went live on Prophetic in April 2025. The results showed up fast.

Search time collapsed. The 50-parcel list that used to take a week now takes under a minute. The time Alexx used to spend searching is now spent connecting with landowners, doing deeper analysis, and pursuing more markets simultaneously.

Response rates jumped 20x. The old approach was form letters. Bracketed insert name, bracketed insert town. Response rates were under 1%. After switching to personalized handwritten postcards through Prophetic's outreach tools, response rates climbed to around 20%. Landowners who said "not right now" became relationships instead of dead ends.

"We get people writing us back and saying, I so appreciate that postcard. It's not in the cards right now, but we're getting those interactions." Those conversations, tracked inside the platform, turn into future deals.

The calls got better. When a landowner calls back, Alexx can pull up their parcel instantly. Zoning, site data, notes from the last conversation, all there before she says hello. What used to be a fumbling search through spreadsheets became a confident conversation.

Hidden deals surfaced. On one search in Kittery, Prophetic's assemblage feature revealed that a 30-acre parcel was actually connected to additional parcels under related ownership. Over 100 acres combined. Alexx wouldn't have made the connection manually.

And then there was Greenland.

The Deal That Changed Everything

Greenland is one of the most desirable coastal towns in New Hampshire. The Gove Group knew it well. They'd driven through it, searched the tax maps, and thought they'd seen everything worth seeing in an established neighborhood that was built out 20 to 30 years ago.

There was nothing calling attention to the lot. It looked like a space between two houses.

Prophetic flagged it during a routine single-lot search. The owner had inherited it from her father, held it for years, and had no idea of its value. The Gove Group reached out via handwritten postcard, struck a deal, and broke ground.

"We didn't even know it existed," Alexx said. "We've looked at the tax maps a hundred times. We've driven through the neighborhood a hundred times."

The lot sits in a neighborhood where homes sell for around $2 million. The deal alone will more than cover the cost of the platform.

"I feel pretty confident that despite being an expert in this market, we may never have identified that lot without Prophetic. There was nothing sort of calling us to it."

What the Platform Actually Does

For those new to Prophetic, here's what powers results like these:

• SearchAI lets you draw a search polygon across any geography -- crossing county lines, state lines, multiple zoning jurisdictions -- and filter for developable parcels by zoning, acreage, wetlands coverage, flood zones, lot dimensions, ownership type, and more. What used to take a week of manual scrolling runs in seconds across dozens of towns simultaneously.
• ZoneAI pre-extracts zoning rules from municipal ordinances using AI -- permitted uses, minimum lot sizes, density limits, setbacks, open space requirements -- and cites the source page so you can verify before you commit. In New Hampshire, where every town has its own ordinance, this alone changes what's possible.
• The LRM (Land Relationship Manager) keeps every parcel, note, contact, and follow-up organized in one place. It tracks live data changes -- ownership transfers, zoning amendments, foreclosure filings -- so your pipeline doesn't degrade while you work it. Tasks and reminders make sure no relationship falls through the cracks.
• SiteAI generates compliant site plans from raw parcels -- accounting for wetlands, flood zones, slopes, setbacks, and your target lot dimensions -- so you can walk into a landowner conversation with a real picture of what's possible on their land.
• DevMap maps residential subdivisions across the country with sales data attached, so you can answer the "should I" question about any market before you spend a dollar acquiring.

In Her Own Words

"Taking the old process and adapting it to Prophetic, running those searches for single lots in each town, and getting those lists together in a few minutes instead of a week. That gives us 20 hours a week to connect with landowners in different ways, to do more marketing, to get the word out."

"Being able to have access to all the data and paint a picture for the owner and having a tool in your toolbox to help them understand what their land is worth. It really is a concrete way to move it to the next step, to create trust and give them data."

"You guys have revolutionized the way that we work."

The Verdict

The constraint to growth in land acquisition isn't capital. It's not deal flow.

It's evaluation capacity. How fast you can go from "interesting" to "confident decision," and whether you're finding opportunities systematically or by chance.

The Gove Group went from analyzing 100 to 200 parcels a year to more than 3,000 in their first 12 months on Prophetic. They went from less than 1% landowner response rates to 20%. They found a $700,000 lot in a neighborhood they'd searched a hundred times.

If your competitors aren't using this yet, you're early. If they are, you're behind.