National Homebuilder M/I Homes Hires Prophetic for Land Evaluation

M/I Homes, a leading national homebuilder, has engaged Prophetic, a technology provider focused on land acquisition tools, to help speed its land evaluation and acquisition process.

The deployment of Prophetic’s software unifies parcel discovery, regulatory and environmental analysis, competitive and market analysis, yield estimates and pipeline management in an AI-native system across M/I Homes’ single-family homebuilding operations.

“At the end of the day, this is about how quickly we can turn data into a confident decision,” Ron Frissora, chief information officer at Columbus, Ohio-based M/I Homes, said in a statement. “Being able to evaluate more sites, eliminate dead ends earlier, and focus our teams on the right opportunities has a direct impact on how we grow.”

An AI-native platform for land acquisition, Prophetic is designed to combine the land acquisition workflow in one system for contractors, developers, brokers and investors. The platform’s automation of manual activities interprets zoning regulations across U.S. cities with high accuracy, giving land teams a consistent understanding of what can be built, regardless of where they are evaluating, according to the Portland, Ore.-based company.

“It signals the pace of the industry shift that’s occurring, and how quickly this new technology is being adopted,” Oliver Alexander, founder and CEO of Prophetic, said about M/I Homes’ adoption of the company’s technology. “There’s a lot of talk about AI. There’s a lot of tools that solve this one thing, or chatbots, but the reality is that there’s the AI that you see as an individual and consumer, and then there’s the enterprise AI that’s actually powering businesses at scale. 

“So to see another major publicly traded homebuilder adopt this technology is just further proof that the technology is not a bubble, it’s not hype. It is changing the fundamental dynamics of how the game is played in real estate development, specifically in decision-making. And the early adopters are just so far ahead of the curve on it.”

Alexander said he sees land use technology discovery and evaluation as being at a tipping point in the real estate industry.

“We describe the current moment of real estate as this kind of eye of the hurricane, this halo moment, if you will,” he said. “You think of a hurricane — you’ve made it to the middle of that eye of the hurricane, you bruised your knuckles and probably broke an arm or two, and you certainly took your licks learning about all these things — but you made it through the first part of the storm. Then, there’s this technology waiting for you that allows you to take your skill set, combine it with ultra-powerful technology, and collect these off-market opportunities that our customers are finding at scale. It’s such an opportunity-rich space right now. On the other side of the eye of the hurricane, once this type of technology is adopted everywhere — it’s getting adopted at a very quick pace across the industry — the hurricane will get much more intense for those who haven’t adopted anything.

“Unless you are the most well-resourced company that can just throw six-figure headcount at this problem. Only the cream of the crop of major national homebuilders and developers can afford to do that. Everyone else fights over the scraps on the market. So this technology has just completely changed the paradigm to where anyone can now operate with the same efficiency of hunting off-market land as the big guys.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.