# Case Study

# Instant ROI on Off-Market Sourcing

## How a Florida Homebuilder Hit a 23% Response Rate in Tightly Held Submarkets

The best parcels rarely show up as public listings. A Florida homebuilder needed a way to surface owners directly, reach them at scale, and move on opportunities before competitors knew they existed. The builder agreed to share their approach on the condition of anonymity.

### Summary:

- Tightly Held Inventory, Slow Relationship-Driven Sourcing, No Direct Path to Owners
- Systematic Owner Discovery, Direct Outreach at Scale, Real-Time Market Intelligence
- 23% Off-Market Landowner Response Rate, Instant ROI from the First Wave, A Repeatable Playbook

### **THE CHALLENGE:**

#### Always Downstream of Someone Else’s Timing

They operate in some of Florida’s most competitive submarkets. Homes can sit with individual owners scattered across a region, invisible to anyone running a traditional search.

Most land teams rely on brokers, word of mouth, and slow relationship-building. The problem with that approach is simple: you’re always downstream of someone else’s timing. By the time a parcel is being talked about, you’re one of fifteen calls the seller is taking.

They wanted a different model. One where their team controlled the outreach, set the pace, and reached landowners directly with a credible, specific offer before the rest of the market knew anything was in play.

> _“We’re knocking them down like crazy. We’re at 23% right now. Response rate. When you compare it to any other mailer, that’s insane.”_

### **THE SOLUTION:**

#### Owner Discovery, Direct Outreach, and Market Intelligence in One Place

Prophetic gave them three capabilities that reshaped their sourcing motion:

- **Systematic Landowner Discovery:** Using Prophetic’s parcel and ownership data, they identified individual lot owners that brokers had overlooked and built a targeted outreach campaign around them. Owners who were effectively invisible to brokers and traditional search tools became a defined, addressable list.
- **Direct Outreach at Scale:** The team launched a handwritten letter campaign sourced through Prophetic. Letters went out in the opening wave. The outreach was personal, specific, and went directly to the owner instead of through the broker chain.
- **Market Intelligence Across the Footprint:** DevMap gave them real-time visibility into competitor activity, absorption rates, and community-level ownership splits across Florida. When the team drove through a neighborhood and thought absorption looked thin, they could pull up the data instantly to confirm it.

### **THE RESULTS:**

#### A Direct Channel to Inventory Competitors Couldn’t Reach

The numbers came in fast, and they reframed how they approach sourcing in Florida. A single campaign produced response rates, pipeline volume, and market positioning that the traditional broker-driven model could not match.

- **23% Off-Market Landowner Response Rate.** Industry average for direct mail to off-market landowners runs around 1–2%. They are now running more than ten times that rate.
- **Instant ROI on the First Campaign.** No learning curve, no optimization period. The first send paid the platform back, and then some.
- **Community-Wide Awareness as a Compounding Asset.** More landowners are discovering that they are actively buying, which means future inbound becomes part of the model.
- **Field Instincts Confirmed by Data.** DevMap turned gut checks into decisions. When something on the ground felt off, the team had the absorption and ownership data to validate or reject it in seconds.
- **A Repeatable Playbook for the Next Market.** They are applying the playbook to all of their markets. The motion travels with the strategy.

Off-market sourcing in tightly held submarkets is not a luck-based motion. With the right data and the right outreach running on the same platform, it becomes a repeatable engine, and one that pays for itself inside the first wave.