Screened 217 deals in 9 weeks vs. 38 the prior quarter
Memo draft pipeline cut analyst time per deal from 4 hours to 35 minutes. IC decisions still human; the funnel widened.
Value-add fund, $420M AUM · January 2026
The bottleneck was not deal flow. It was the time between an OM landing in the inbox and a screening memo the team could actually discuss. Analysts were spending most of their week extracting numbers and formatting paragraphs, which meant the fund was passing on deals for no better reason than that nobody had gotten to them yet.
That is an expensive way to lose. A deal you never screened looks identical, in hindsight, to a deal you screened and declined.
What we shipped
OMs land in Drive. A worker pulls the rent roll, the T-12, and submarket comps into a structured object, so every deal arrives in the same shape regardless of how the broker packaged it. A second worker drafts the screening memo against the fund’s own template. The analyst opens it, edits, and routes to IC.
The analyst is still the one who decides what the deal is worth. What changed is that they start from a populated memo instead of a blank page and a stack of PDFs.
How we measured it
The 217 figure counts deals that reached a written screening memo inside the nine week window, against 38 in the prior quarter under the old process. Both counts come from the fund’s own deal log, not from our system.
Analyst time per deal moved from about four hours to about thirty five minutes. That is time from OM open to memo ready for review, self reported by the analysts on the same tracker they were already keeping. It is a working estimate, not a stopwatch study, and we would treat it as directional.
Template adherence is the one number that is exactly what it says. Every memo the pipeline produced carried every section the fund’s template requires, because the draft cannot be produced without them.
Guard rails
The pipeline drafts, it does not decide. No memo reaches IC without an analyst editing and signing it. Anything the extractor is unsure about is flagged in the draft rather than guessed, so a missing T-12 line shows up as a gap the analyst has to close instead of a confident number nobody checked.
Extraction is also checked against itself. Where the rent roll and the T-12 disagree, the memo says so rather than picking one.
What stayed human
Pricing risk. Reading the seller. Knowing when the market is rolling over. The judgment that a deal is technically fine and still wrong for this fund at this moment in the cycle.
Widening the funnel only helps if the screen at the end of it is still sharp. The point was never to put more deals in front of IC. It was to stop losing good ones to a queue.
What we won’t show you
The fund’s screening criteria, the comp selection logic, and the thresholds that move a deal from screen to full underwriting. That framework is the fund’s edge and it stays theirs. What carries across engagements is the extraction and drafting plumbing, not the investment thesis.