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Case Study · CRE Underwriting

A month of underwriting, in an afternoon.

A developer's VP was stitching a dozen separate asset models into one district pro forma by hand. He put it at four weeks of full-time work. So we engineered his team a system, custom CRE workflows plus a stack of specialist AI agents, that builds it in an afternoon and pressure-tests it the way a full deal team would.

A system we engineered from the ground up, owned by their team and rerun on every deal
0 wks → hrs
a VP's estimate, done in an afternoon
0 asset classes
hotel, multifamily, retail, for-sale, F&B
1 model
one workbook, not a dozen linked files
0/22
integrity checks pass, every rebuild
See how it consolidates
01 The challenge

A district is a dozen deals wearing one trench coat.

A mixed-use district is not one building. It is a hotel, a few multifamily phases, a retail block, a row of townhomes, and a handful of restaurants, each underwritten in its own Excel model, with its own assumptions. To raise money on the whole thing, someone has to fuse all of them into a single pro forma a lender or an investment committee will actually trust: one capital stack, one waterfall, one set of returns.

Done by hand, that is roughly four weeks of full-time work. And it drifts. Numbers stop tying between the master and the parts, the capital stack stops balancing, and three different equity figures end up in the same deck. It is slow, it is fragile, and it has to be redone for every deal.

Then it has to survive a room full of skeptics. A lender stress-tests the coverage, a credit committee hunts for what is uninsurable, an investor asks why the returns are thin. One VP cannot be a builder, a banker, a lender, and an investor at the same time, and the model has to answer all of them, or the raise stalls.

We don't underwrite their deals. We built them the model that does.
02 What we built

Custom CRE workflows their team runs on any district.

Not a one-off spreadsheet, and not a template off a shelf. We built the commercial-real-estate underwriting skills from the ground up, plus a master model their analysts own and operate. Point it at the asset models and it consolidates them into one investment-banking-grade district pro forma, the same way on this deal and the next.

01

Ingest

Pulls every asset model in: hotel, multifamily, retail, for-sale, F&B.

02

Normalize

One set of dates, escalations, fees, and exit assumptions across all of them.

03

Consolidate

One capital stack, one phased land takedown, one combined cash flow and waterfall.

04

Stress-test

Downside break case, sensitivity matrix, and an integrity harness that must pass.

03 Not a template

We built a deal team, not a spreadsheet.

This did not come off a shelf. We engineered the CRE underwriting skills from the ground up, and built a stack of specialized AI agents to run them: a virtual deal team that reviews every model the way a real one would. A builder, a financier, an investor, and a lender, each pulling at it from their own angle, in parallel.

Development Manager
Checks the budget, the schedule, and the construction costs the way a builder would.
Capital Markets Specialist
Sizes the debt, structures the stack, and prices the public financing.
Skeptical LP
Asks the questions an investor asks before committing a dollar.
Conservative Lender
Stress-tests recourse and coverage, and flags what a credit committee will reject.
4 specialists, in parallel 15 structural issues caught before it shipped 6 math bugs fixed before it went out

That is the kind of scrutiny that normally costs weeks of meetings with expensive people. Here it runs in minutes, on every deal, and the developer owns the whole team.

04 What it produced

One workbook a banker would recognize.

Twenty-four tabs. Fourteen asset slots across five property types, each with full dev budget, financing, operations, and disposition. A district capital stack with senior debt, public financing, mezzanine, preferred equity, and a GP co-invest. A four-tier European waterfall with clawback. The headline that falls out the bottom:

District returns · combined live formulas
$200M+
total project cost
5
asset classes, one stack
4-tier
European waterfall + clawback
120-mo
cash flow, live XIRR
Hotel
2 slots
Multifamily
3 slots
F&B
5 slots
Retail
2 slots
For-sale
2 slots
Senior debt
Public financing
Investor equity
Senior debt Public / TIF financing Investor equity (LP + GP co-invest)
05 Ironclad by design

It ties out, or it does not ship.

A model is only worth what a lender or an IC will trust. So every rebuild runs an integrity harness: the master is cross-checked against an independent shadow model and a battery of internal tests. All of them have to read PASS. If a number stops tying, the build fails loudly instead of quietly handing over a deck with three different equity figures in it.

Integrity harness22 / 22 PASS
Uses equal sources, to the dollarPASS
Per-asset cash flows roll to districtPASS
Waterfall distributions reconcile to cashPASS
Live XIRR matches the shadow modelPASS
Debt service covers at target coveragePASS
Downside break case computes and holdsPASS

It also writes a mandatory downside case and a sensitivity matrix, so the team walks into the room already knowing where the deal bends. Defensible, not just pretty.

06 The value

Four weeks of work, and it comes back on every deal.

By hand~4 weeks full-time
With the workflowan afternoon
A month of senior underwriting, recovered, on the first deal alone.
Four weeks is the VP of development's own estimate for consolidating the district by hand. The workflow is a one-time build; the team reruns it on every future deal, and it ties out the same way each time.

And it compounds. Every new district, every new capital raise, every assumption change that used to mean a week of rework is now a rerun, vetted by the same virtual deal team each time. The expensive part, building the model and the specialists that pressure-test it, was built once.

Your underwriting is a workflow. We can build it.

We don't underwrite your deals for you. We build your team the CRE infrastructure that does it: a model, and a stack of specialist agents to pressure-test it, ironclad and reusable, so the month you used to spend per deal comes back on every one. If that is the kind of leverage you want, let's talk.

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