Acquisition screening
We take a buy box and turn it into a ranked, underwritten shortlist — every candidate carried through the same assumption set so the ranking means something.
Why it is done this way
A screen is not an analysis. Its job is to take a market of thousands and hand you thirty things worth an hour each — and to be honest about what it threw away.
The failure mode is a screen that quietly bakes in an optimistic assumption. Underwrite at gross scheduled income instead of effective gross and every row looks six percent better. Leave the CapEx reserve out and the older stock rises to the top of the list purely because it is old. We name every assumption on the face of the deliverable for exactly this reason.
The second failure mode is comparing incomparable things. Rent per building tells you a fourplex beats a house. Rent per unit, against unit size and bedroom count, tells you whether it actually does.
How it runs
Define the buy box
Price band, product type, unit count, submarket set, minimum DSCR and the leverage you can actually get. Most engagements start by discovering the buy box is three incompatible constraints.
Pull and normalise
Listings, tax records, assessor characteristics and rent evidence, normalised so a fourplex and a house can be compared per unit rather than per building.
Underwrite uniformly
One assumption set across every candidate. Property-specific facts — actual tax bill, actual HOA, actual mechanical age — override the defaults; nothing else does.
Rank and reject
The shortlist comes with the rejects and the reason. A screen that only shows you what passed hides the shape of the market.
Questions we are asked
Do you find off-market deals?
No. We are an analytics desk, not a brokerage. We screen what is available to you and tell you which of it is worth diligence. If your acquisition channel is off-market, we screen that pipeline instead.
What if nothing passes?
Then that is the finding, and it is a real one. In a market where the mortgage constant sits above most going-in cap rates, "nothing in this buy box clears 1.15 DSCR" is worth knowing before you spend three months looking.
Not investment, tax or legal advice. All returns shown are estimates produced by a model from assumptions you can change, not offers, appraisals or guarantees. Real results differ. Consult your own licensed advisers before acting.