How to manage an LOI pipeline without losing a deal to silence

The gap where deals actually die

Underwriting has a model and an output. Due diligence has a checklist and a hard deadline. The LOI stage between them has neither by default, and that is exactly where deals stall. A letter goes out, the broker says the seller is reviewing, ten days pass, and nobody on the team can say whether the deal is alive without scrolling an email thread.

The volume backdrop makes the slate bigger than it used to be. Altus Group counted 176,445 U.S. properties transacted in 2025, the first annual increase in property count since 2021, with total volume up 14.4 percent to $560.2 billion. CBRE put Q1 2026 investment at $117 billion, up 19 percent year over year, with private buyers accounting for $66 billion of it. More trades means more marketed processes, more bid deadlines, and more letters outstanding per team at any given moment.

Managing that slate starts with treating each LOI as a record instead of an email. Every letter gets a status, one owner, and two dates. If you want the legal groundwork on the document itself, including which provisions bind and which do not, start with what a letter of intent is in commercial real estate. This page covers the operational side, which is where letters get lost.

Five statuses, one owner, two dates

An LOI pipeline runs on a small, fixed vocabulary. Five statuses cover every letter a team will ever write, and each status carries an age limit that turns silence into an action.

The age limits are the working part of the table. A Submitted letter at day 12 is a phone call today, made by the named owner. An Accepted deal at day 35 with no executed PSA means counsel is stuck or the seller is retrading, and either one is worth knowing this week rather than next month.

Beyond status, every letter carries exactly two dates. The response deadline is the date you asked the seller to answer by, and it triggers your follow-up. The expiration is the date your offer lapses by its own terms, and it forces a deliberate choice to extend, revise, or walk. Teams that track neither date end up with offers that are technically expired and emotionally still alive, which is the worst state a deal can occupy.

A worked quarter of LOI activity

Here is what one quarter looked like for a four-person acquisitions team buying value-add industrial, with the arithmetic that makes the slate legible.

The team submitted 16 LOIs in the quarter. Six were rejected outright or lost to other bidders. Five drew counters; three of those converged over one or two rounds and were accepted, and two died on price. Two more were accepted without a counter. Three remained open at quarter end. That is 5 acceptances on 13 resolved letters, a 38 percent acceptance rate, which sits inside the healthy band.

Now the cost math. Each of those 16 letters stood on roughly 20 hours of underwriting, so the quarter's slate represents about 320 analyst hours of upstream work. One letter that expires unnoticed does not waste 20 hours; it wastes 20 hours plus the deal, because a lapsed offer on a live process reads as a withdrawn buyer. The team's own log showed the median seller response arriving at 8 business days, and two responses landed after the internal 10-day limit. Both of those deals survived because a follow-up call was already scheduled for day 10, which is the entire argument for age limits in one sentence.

The quarter's dead letters earned their keep too. On the two counters that died on price, the team recorded the seller's final number. One of those properties came back to market 11 weeks later at 4 percent below that number, and the team re-engaged in a day because the record existed.

The weekly LOI review checklist

Run this once a week, same day, fifteen minutes. Copy it into your meeting notes or your pipeline board as a standing block.

1. Walk every open LOI, oldest first.

1. Confirm each status matches reality. A Submitted letter with a verbal counter on the table is Countered, today.

1. Check days in status against the age limits. Anything over the limit leaves the meeting with an action and an owner.

1. Confirm the next follow-up date on every Submitted and Countered letter. No letter sits without a scheduled touch.

1. Flag every expiration inside 7 days. Extend it, follow up on it, or kill it on purpose.

1. Confirm every Accepted letter has PSA drafting in motion, with counsel engaged and a target execution date.

1. Record the outcome and final terms on anything that died this week, including the winning number if you know it.

1. Count the slate by status and compare against last week. A growing Drafting column with a flat Submitted column means letters are stalling internally, which is your own bottleneck and the easiest one to fix.

Why the dates matter more in a cautious market

The NAIOP CRE Sentiment Index came in at 52 in March 2026, down from the September 2025 reading, with respondents ranking local economic conditions and interest rates as the two factors that most shape their decisions and expressing less optimism about both. A market in that mood produces hesitant sellers, and hesitant sellers sit on offers.

That changes the texture of LOI management. Response windows stretch. Counters arrive slowly and retrade small terms. The buyer who tracks response deadlines and follows up on schedule reads the hesitation early and can decide whether to hold terms, sweeten the deposit, or move capital to the next deal. The buyer running LOIs from an inbox discovers the hesitation when the expiration has already passed.

Keeping the slate in one place

A spreadsheet handles an LOI slate of three or four letters. Past that, the letter, the counters, the dates, and the follow-up tasks live in four different places, and the weekly review turns into an archaeology session.

The alternative is keeping the LOI stage inside the same system as the rest of the deal. In MotionCRE, LOI is a column on the pipeline board, so days in stage is visible on every card and the Monday review is a walk down one column. Each card opens into a deal workspace where the letter versions and counters sit in files, the response deadline and expiration sit in key dates with their own statuses, and the follow-up calls sit as assigned tasks. Moving the card and updating the record are the same action.

Whatever tool you use, the test is the same three questions, answered in under a minute. How many letters are outstanding and in what status. Which ones have a date inside 7 days. What did we offer the last time we bid on a deal like this. If any answer requires opening an inbox, the pipeline is running on memory, and memory is what expires first.