Case Study · Commercial Real Estate · 6-8 week build
CRE AI Analyst.Institutional underwriting. At startup speed.
An acquisitions firm drowning in inbound OMs now screens 50+ deals per week with IC-ready pro formas in fifteen minutes instead of four-to-eight hours. Every number traceable. Zero hallucinations.
50+
15 min
100%
Challenge & Approach
Throughput-bound, not talent-bound.
Twenty-plus offering memoranda hit this firm’s desk every week across multifamily, industrial, and retail. They could only underwrite three or four. Each deal was four-to- eight hours of manual rekey, pro forma modeling, comp work, and IC memo drafting, and hiring more analysts meant $200K+ per head and months of ramp. Off-the-shelf underwriting SaaS was too rigid for their model. Good deals were dying in the pile.
PSV ran a six-to-eight week engagement in four phases. Phase 1 ingested the firm’s own Excel pro forma templates, return thresholds, and deal criteria, and mapped the IC workflow end-to-end. Phase 2 built the multi-format OM parser, pro forma engine calibrated to the house model, submarket comp layer, and debt / waterfall modeling. Phase 3 ran a side-by-side shadow period: analysts reviewed every AI model against their own manual work until the outputs matched the expert baseline.
Nothing touched IC until the team trusted it. The AI went live, IC memo auto-drafting came online in Phase 4, and PSV remains engaged as the firm’s AI engineering partner, adding asset classes, tuning against closed-deal feedback, handling the quarter-end crunch.
Key Technical Decisions
Three calls that earned the firm’s trust.
Three architecture calls drove how much the firm trusted the output, and therefore how much of the real workflow the AI could replace.
01
Multi-format OM parsing
Purpose-built parsing pipeline for PDF decks, Excel rent rolls, and scanned docs. Every field extracted with a provenance pointer back to the source page, cell, or row, click any number in the model and see exactly where it came from.
02
Pro forma engine, not napkin math
The pro forma engine was calibrated against the firm's actual Excel models, not a generic CRE template. Return assumptions, expense growth, reserves, and promote splits mirror the house model so outputs map directly onto the existing IC discussion.
03
12-point QA checklist
Every model runs through a 12-point checklist before it surfaces: rent roll totals reconcile, expense ratios fall within asset-class norms, debt terms match sourced rate sheets, comps are geographically filtered. Failures flag for human review, never silent ship.
Client Testimonial
“Zed, your product is exceptional. Mind if I introduce you to our LPs? I think they’d find this just as useful.”
Results
From 3-4 deals a week to 50+. With an audit trail.
The firm now screens every OM that hits their desk. Good deals that would have died in the pile get underwritten, including the 22% IRR multifamily deal surfaced at 2am and signed to LOI the same day.
50+
Deals Screened / Week
Up from 3-4 per analyst per week. Every inbound OM now gets a real underwrite.
15 min
To IC-Ready Model
OM drop to first-pass pro forma, vs. 4-8 hours of manual modeling and rekey.
12-point
QA Per Model
Every underwrite runs through reconciliation checks; failures flag for human review.
100%
Uptime Through Crunch
Stayed live through tax season and quarter-end when manual capacity would have been saturated.
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