The tax bill resets
A sale usually triggers reassessment. Carry the seller's number forward and year one is wrong before you have modelled anything else.
Real Estate Underwriting Proforma Analysis
Income and expenses taken straight from the seller's own statements, assumptions you set and can defend, and a projection across the hold you can walk a lender through line by line.
The Stakes
You're Buying the Next Ten Years, Not the Last Twelve Months
Everything the seller sends describes a property under their ownership: their management fee, their tax bill, their rents. The deal you are actually buying starts the day you close — and every shortcut between those two things is a deal that pencils on paper and disappoints in year one.
The trailing twelve becomes year one
The single most common way a model is quietly wrong from its first row — and it is invisible, because every number in it is real.
And the assumptions go unnamed
Growth rates buried three tabs deep. When a lender asks why 3%, the answer has to be better than "it was in the template".
The Starting Point
Every Projection Starts From Figures You Approved
The unit mix, rent roll, revenues and expenses are what every later number is built on. They come out of the documents themselves — see document data extraction — and you approve them before anything is projected.
Unit mix
Unit types, counts, average size and in-place rent, totalled from the rent roll itself rather than from a summary page that may be out of date.
Rent roll
Every unit as the document lists it, with the totals checked against the ones the document prints.
Revenues
Gross potential rent, loss to lease, vacancy, concessions, bad debt and other income, as the operating statement reports them.
Expenses
Operating costs line by line, kept apart from capital items — because a roof replacement is not something you inflate at 3% a year.
When the offering memorandum and the rent roll disagree, you are shown both with their numbers side by side — "184 units at $412k" against "272 units at $398k" — and you choose which the deal is built on. The projection waits for that answer, because approving a figure after the forecast already rests on it is not really approving anything.
Your Assumptions
Everything Past Today Is Something You Chose
Each year of the projection exists because of an assumption you set, reviewed before anything is built on it — and each one is a number you can defend with a reason attached.
Rental revenue
Trend growth on in-place rent, or a two-path story where renovated units carry a premium as they turn.
Other income
Parking, pets, RUBS, fees — trended separately, because they rarely move with rent.
Operating expenses
Inflation by line, so insurance and payroll do not have to share one blended number.
Property tax
Reassessment on sale handled properly — the assumption most likely to be wrong in year one, and the one lenders ask about.
Vacancy and credit loss
As a rate on gross potential rent, and stressed independently of growth.
Exit
Exit cap and hold period, which between them decide most of what the IRR turns out to be.
The Broker's Numbers
Their Pro Forma Is a Question, Not a Default
Most offering memorandums carry a forward column, and it is worth seeing — it tells you what the seller expects you to believe. It just should not become your underwriting by accident, which is exactly how it usually does. Cygni keeps it beside your numbers with the page it came from, and asks whether you want to build independently, start from it, or run both and compare them line by line.
The Payoff
A Projection You Can Take to a Lender
Every figure traces back to one of two things: a page in a document you approved, or an assumption you set yourself. There is no third category — nothing appears in the projection you cannot account for, which is the difference between a model that looks presentable and one that survives an investment committee.
From there it feeds the returns each investor sees and the scenarios you test it against, without a number being retyped along the way.
FAQ
Questions About Proforma Analysis
What is a real estate proforma?
A projection of what a property will earn and spend over the period you plan to hold it: income and operating expenses year by year, less debt service, down to the cash available to distribute. It differs from a T-12 in one decisive way — a T-12 records what already happened, and a proforma is an argument about what will.
Why is a T-12 column not year one of a proforma?
Because a trailing twelve months is the seller's operations, and year one is yours — after the tax reassessment a sale triggers, after your management fee, after whatever you intend to do about rents that are under market. Treating them as the same thing is one of the most common ways an underwriting is quietly wrong from the very first row.
Does the AI calculate my proforma?
It does the reading, not the maths. Cygni pulls the figures out of your documents and suggests assumptions — rent growth, vacancy, the exit cap — and you review and change them. The projection itself is calculated the way a spreadsheet calculates, so the same inputs always give the same answer.
Can I just use the broker's pro forma?
You can use it, start from it, or build your own and compare the two — but Cygni asks which, rather than assuming. The broker's projection sits beside yours with the page it came from, so it never quietly becomes your underwriting.
Build One on a Deal You Already Know
Upload the documents from a property you have underwritten by hand and see whether the numbers match what you found.