How to screen commercial real estate deals in 15 minutes each

Screening is a volume problem before it is a judgment problem

The arithmetic sets the terms. Altus Group counted 176,445 U.S. properties transacted in 2025, with total volume up 14.4 percent to $560.2 billion, and an active acquisitions team sits downstream of that flow. Between broker blasts, marketed processes, and off-market outreach, a small team can see 150 to 250 opportunities a year. Full underwriting takes 15 to 20 analyst hours per deal. Underwriting everything is 3,000 to 5,000 hours, which is two full-time analysts doing nothing else.

The screen is the mechanism that makes the math work. Its job is to kill deals cheaply, in a fixed order, against a written standard, so the expensive hours only land on deals with a real chance of closing. And the standard has to be written down. Everything on this page measures against a buy box, the documented statement of asset class, markets, size, price range, and return thresholds the team actually buys. A team screening against an unwritten box is voting, and the vote changes with the room.

Competition sets the other constraint. CBRE counted $117 billion of Q1 2026 investment, up 19 percent year over year, with private buyers taking $66 billion of it. On any decent marketed deal, several of those buyers are in the process with you. A screen that takes two weeks to say no is also taking two weeks to say yes, and the broker has stopped waiting.

The funnel, with numbers

Here is a year of flow for a small acquisitions team with a written box and a disciplined screen, with time cost per stage. The shape matters more than the exact counts.

Total screening and underwriting effort comes to roughly 425 analyst hours for one close, and the funnel is what keeps that number sane. If the first screen went soft and passed 70 deals instead of 40, the detailed review alone would add 90 hours, and the underwriting queue would fill with deals that a 15-minute check should have killed.

Each ratio is a gauge with a healthy band. Sourced to screened around 20 percent, drifting above 35 means the screen went soft, below 10 means sourcing is pulling the wrong deals. Underwritten to LOI around two thirds, because if the team models twelve deals and bids on two, underwriting is being used as a slow way to say no. LOI to close near one in eight in a competitive market. When one ratio moves for two consecutive quarters, something upstream changed, and the funnel tells you where to look.

The 15-minute screening checklist

Copy this into your system and run it in order. The order is by cost, cheapest checks first, so most deals die in the first five minutes and never touch the later steps.

1. Buy box fit, 2 minutes. Asset class, market, size band, price range against the written box. A miss on any of these ends the screen. No exceptions decided at the deal level; exceptions are strategy decisions.

1. Price sanity, 3 minutes. Compute the asking cap rate from the OM's own numbers and compare against current survey data for the asset class and market tier. Priced far through the market with no story means pass.

1. Rent roll and tenancy read, 3 minutes. Occupancy, top-tenant concentration, WALT for commercial, loss to lease for multifamily. You are looking for the one fact that changes the deal, a single tenant at 60 percent of income or a rent roll 20 percent over market.

1. Expense sanity, 2 minutes. The OM's expense ratio against your own comps for the asset class. Underwritten expenses 15 percent below what you know the asset class runs is the oldest trick in the book, and it dies here.

1. Debt test, 3 minutes. Rough DSCR at today's rates and realistic leverage on in-place NOI. A deal that cannot cover its own debt service needs a value-add story with numbers behind it, and the screen should record that dependency explicitly.

1. Story check, 1 minute. Why is the seller selling, and why is this deal reaching you. A loan maturity is a real answer. A deal shopped to forty buyers over six months is also an answer.

1. Red flags, 1 minute. Environmental history, zoning conflicts, ground lease, litigation, flood zone. Any one of these does not necessarily kill the deal, but it moves to the detailed review with a flag on it.

1. Decision. Advance to detailed review, or pass with a one-line reason, inside 48 hours of arrival.

Pricing sanity against real cap rates

Step two carries the most weight per minute spent, and it only works against current data. CBRE's H2 2025 Cap Rate Survey, built from 3,600 cap rate estimates across more than 50 U.S. markets from over 200 of the firm's professionals, found all-property yields holding between 3.9 and 4.2 percent at year end, with nearly all respondents believing cap rates have peaked. That survey, refreshed twice a year, is the kind of benchmark the screen should quote, because "feels expensive" is not a screening criterion.

The mechanics take three minutes. Pull NOI from the OM, divide by asking price, and compare the result against the survey band for the asset class and market tier. A cap rate calculator does the arithmetic; the judgment is in the comparison. A stabilized asset asking 80 basis points through the survey range needs an explanation the OM usually does not contain.

The debt test in step five works the same way. Rough numbers are fine at screening depth, current market rate, 60 to 65 percent leverage, in-place NOI, and a DSCR check against the 1.20 to 1.25 floor most lenders hold. The point at screening depth is a classification, whether the deal works on its current income or only works if the business plan does. Both can be buys. Only one should be underwritten as stabilized.

The 48-hour rule and the pass log

A screen produces two outputs, and most teams only keep one. The advance decision gets attention because it starts work. The pass gets an email and disappears. Keeping the pass is worth more than it looks.

Logged passes compound three ways. The same property comes back to market months later, repriced, and the team that logged its first look re-engages in an hour instead of re-screening from scratch. The pass reasons aggregate into strategy evidence, because thirty passes reading "pricing does not clear our model" in one metro is a fact about the buy box. And the log is what makes the funnel measurable at all, since a sourced count that only includes deals somebody liked is not a sourced count.

The 48-hour decision window is the other half of the discipline. Brokers route flow toward buyers who answer, and a fast, specific no with a reason builds more sourcing relationships than a slow maybe. Deals sitting undecided in the screening stage also carry a quieter cost, because every open item takes a slice of the team's attention on Monday morning.

Where the screen lives

The screen works when it runs the same way for every deal, and that is a systems property. In MotionCRE, screening is the first column on the pipeline board, every sourced deal enters there, and days in stage shows exactly which deals are approaching the 48-hour line. The checklist rides along as stage-triggered tasks, the pass reason is a field on the record, and a killed deal stays searchable, so the re-listing that arrives in November matches the pass from March.

Deals that clear the screen start moving through detailed review toward a letter, and the slate of letters becomes its own management problem, covered in how to manage an LOI pipeline. The screen's job ends where that page begins, with eight deals a year that earned the team's full attention, and a written record of the 192 that did not.