Short answer: if a broker OM lands on Monday and you need to decide on an LOI this week, Moraine turns the OM into an editable, source-linked DCF model, reading the rent roll pages, the broker’s pro forma, the market leasing legend, and financing terms. You spend your time reviewing what it flags, not keying leases. It covers office, retail, and industrial, on a free 14-day evaluation (no card, no automatic charge), then Individual at $300 per month. Honest limit: an OM is the broker’s story, so the model shows exactly how much of it rests on the broker’s numbers, and you still make the call.
Why screening is where time goes
Most OMs you see, you pass on. The problem is you don’t know which ones until you’ve built enough of a model to disagree with the broker, and building that model from a PDF takes most of a day: rent roll re-keyed, steps and expirations checked, recoveries approximated, market leasing assumptions set for the rollover.
When I was on the buy side, the constraint on a busy week wasn’t the number of deals worth a look. It was how many we could get to a defensible first model before the call-for-offers date. A screening model you correct instead of build changes that math.
Who this is for, and who it isn’t
This is for you if:
- You are an acquisitions analyst, associate, or VP screening office, retail, or industrial OMs at a fund, REIT, family office, or independent sponsor.
- You need a first-pass model good enough to set an LOI price and a list of questions for the broker.
- You want to keep working the same model if the deal moves forward.
This isn’t for you if:
- The OMs are multifamily, hotel, self-storage, or single-family.
- You want the software to decide lease status the OM doesn’t state. Moraine opens a review item instead.
- You need a formatted PDF screening memo. This report workflow exports XLSX.
The workflow, step by step
1. Upload the OM. On the Acquisition pipeline, click Upload OM (top right). Your file picker opens directly; pick the PDF. Moraine creates the deal row and starts reading. The row moves from Intake processing to Ready to build.
2. Build. Click Build. The row shows Building model with live progress. You can leave the page and upload the next OM while it builds. When the row reads Model ready, it shows open-item counts so you know how much review is waiting.
3. Read the intake report in order. Census first (did extraction see every suite?), then the three tie-outs against the OM’s stated figures (extracted rent, reconstructed recoveries, NOI), then the Broken items, each with a Jump link to the input that needs a decision. The Model trust chip shows RED, AMBER, or GREEN as you work them down.
4. Work the vs Broker view. On Pro Forma (⌘9), the vs Broker tab compares your modeled Year 1 to the broker’s line by line, with the delta, a severity status, and the OM page cited. Each divergent line explains itself and offers Jump →, Reconcile, or Fix with agent. This is where your broker questions come from.
5. Put in your view. On Assumptions (⌘1), set exit cap, hold, growth, vacancy, and financing. Apply your firm’s MLA preset if you have one. Every edit recalculates the full model; the IRR in the scenario bar moves as you type. For cross-cutting changes, tell the agent (“set exit cap to 6.25%”) and accept its changeset.
6. Find the LOI number. Scenarios (⌘0): duplicate Base into a Downside and stress it. Sensitivity: pick two assumptions and a return metric; each cell is a full engine run, so a base case sitting on a cliff is itself a finding.
7. Send the screen. In Export, compose Deal Snapshot, Annual Cash Flow, Lease Expiration Schedule, Sensitivity Matrix, and Source Lineage & Warnings. The workbook carries the model’s trust disclosure, so your VP sees what was mapped from the OM and what was defaulted.
The screening funnel for a REIT or multi-deal team
The unit economics of screening are different from those of one deal. Illustrative quarter for an acquisitions team: 40 OMs screened, 12 underwritten, 3 closed.
| Stage | Deals | Share of previous stage | What each deal needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screened | 40 | A first model from the OM, tie-outs against the broker’s figures, a list of questions | |
| Underwritten | 12 | 30% | Your assumptions, scenarios, a downside case, an LOI number |
| Closed | 3 | 25% | Full diligence on leases, T-12 and data room |
Two points follow from the arithmetic. First, if building a first model by hand takes about 8 analyst hours (use your own number), 40 screens is 320 hours, or roughly eight weeks of one analyst, so teams cut screening short and the deals that get looked at are the ones that arrived when someone had time. Second, buying full diligence at the screening stage is the wrong place to spend: at $3,000 per property, diligence on all 40 would be $120,000, while diligence on the 12 that reach LOI is $36,000. Moraine’s Individual plan ($300 per month) covers unlimited screening models; the $3,000 diligence suite is for the deal that survives. Teams that want shared underwriting, firm assumptions and centralized billing start at $1,500 per month for five users.
Also decide up front what a screen must output so every deal is comparable: the same export set (Deal Snapshot, Annual Cash Flow, Sensitivity Matrix, Source Lineage & Warnings) and the same questions to the broker.
Pricing, integrations, and limits that apply
- Trial: 14 days of unlimited underwriting with Excel exports, starting when the first usable model is ready. No card, no automatic charge.
- Individual: $300 per month for unlimited underwriting models, scenarios, Excel exports, the full report catalog, and the modeling agent. Month-to-month.
- Due diligence suite: $3,000 one-time per deal, separate from Individual, for the deal that makes it past LOI.
- Integrations: exports XLSX reports, including monthly cash flows for spreadsheet review. Imports supported ARGUS Enterprise Excel report packages you are authorized to upload and process. No native Yardi or MRI connectors.
- Limits: office, retail, and industrial only. Underwriting exports are XLSX, not PDF. No live multi-user editing. Moraine will not infer lease status the documents don’t state. A qualified underwriter should still review open items, source conflicts, recoveries, and return assumptions before IC.
- Security: documents are never used to train Moraine’s or third-party models; each firm’s data is isolated at the database level.
How this compares
Back-of-envelope on the broker’s NOI. Fastest, and it prices the broker’s assumptions rather than the leases. Fine for a pass; risky for an LOI.
A model in ARGUS Enterprise. This may be the required workflow when your committee or counterparty requests its native deliverable. Compare the time to reach a reviewed first model on the same OM; an XLSX report from Moraine does not by itself satisfy a native-model requirement.
Deal-pipeline software. Tools like Dealpath are built to track deals, documents, and approvals across a team. Building the underwriting model from the OM is a different job, and it’s the one Moraine’s pipeline exists to do.
Background: what’s inside an offering memorandum, how commercial real estate underwriting works, and what makes a good cap rate.
Screen this week’s OMs
Upload the one on your desk and see how much of the broker’s NOI survives the vs Broker view.
Start a free trial → 14 days of unlimited underwriting with Excel exports, starting when the first usable model is ready. No card, no automatic charge.