Commercial Real Estate Underwriting, Cited

Commercial real estate underwriting — CRE underwriting — is the analysis that decides whether a deal is worth doing. You establish what a property actually earns and spends today, project that across your hold period, layer on the debt, and see what the returns look like for each party. In practice it means turning a rent roll, a T-12 and an offering memorandum into a cash-flow projection you can defend to a lender or an investor.

Start from what the documents state rather than what the pro forma projects: in-place rents from the rent roll, actual operating expenses from the T-12, and the unit mix as it stands today. Project those forward on assumptions you can name — rent growth, vacancy, expense inflation, exit cap — and judge the deal on cash-on-cash, IRR, equity multiple and DSCR together. No single metric survives a rate move on its own.

Rent rolls, T-12s and operating statements, P&Ls, offering memorandums and seller disclosures, as PDF, image, XLS or XLSX. Spreadsheets are parsed from the actual grid rather than read off a picture of one, so a 272-unit rent roll comes back as 272 rows — each carrying the sheet and cell its figure was read from, and checked against the totals the document itself prints.

Every number carries its source. A figure taken from a document shows the page — or the sheet and cell — it came from, and you confirm each extraction before anything is built on it. And the AI does the reading, not the maths — it pulls the figures out of your documents and suggests assumptions, but your IRR and your waterfall are calculated, the way a spreadsheet calculates.

It does the reading. Upload the documents and Cygni classifies them, finds the figures and extracts them with a citation attached — the part of underwriting that costs hours and where transcription errors creep in. You confirm what it found, pick the source when two documents disagree about the same number, and the projection is compiled from there.

By making the assumptions visible and testable. Every assumption behind the projection — rent growth, vacancy, expense inflation, exit cap, loan terms — is one you set and can change, and the cash flow is worked out again each time, so you can put a refinance, a slower lease-up and a softer exit side by side instead of arguing about a single number.

Both. A solo investor underwriting a couple of deals a month and a team running a pipeline use the same platform; the plans differ in how many underwritings, documents and investor seats they include. Pricing starts at $299 a month, and every plan includes a 7-day free trial.

Yes — there is a 7-day free trial, and it runs the whole workflow rather than a demo of it. Upload a real deal's documents, confirm the extractions, and take it through to a cash-flow projection and a waterfall distribution, so you are judging the output on a property you already know.