Most investment committee memo guides give you an outline: the section headings, in the order a committee expects them. What they do not give you is what a good one actually looks like filled in.
This template starts from a worked example generated from a real underwriting run, on a real address, with a real cap rate, a real sensitivity table and named comparables. You are filling in the gaps against a standard, not staring at a blank page guessing what level of detail is enough.
What A Blank Template Leaves Out
Guides like the structural walkthroughs from getrefm.com and atlasx.co are useful for the order of sections. They are less useful for the harder question: how much evidence is enough under "comparable sales," and what does a defensible assumptions section actually read like.
A blank Word or PDF template cannot answer that, because it has no numbers in it. The analyst either copies the format from the last memo that survived committee, or guesses.
The Sections, With What Committees Actually Push On
A real estate IC memo typically covers:
- The asset and its physical condition.
- The market and submarket case.
- In-place rent against market rent, and the gap between them.
- The underwriting and the assumptions behind it.
- Comparable evidence, for both the entry value and the projected exit.
- The capital plan.
- The return profile.
- The risks, stated as what would have to be true for the deal to fail.
Committees spend most of their time on two of these: assumptions and comparables. A cap rate the memo asserts without a named comparable behind it gets pushed back. An assumption stated as a range with a reason survives scrutiny better than a single confident number.
What The Worked Example Shows
Rather than a placeholder that says "insert comparable set here," a template built from a real underwriting run shows:
- A cap rate derived from named, dated comparables, not asserted.
- A sensitivity table showing how the return moves against the assumptions most likely to be wrong.
- A rent roll and T12 reconciled against each other, with the gaps stated rather than smoothed over.
- A risk section framed as conditions, not adjectives: what would have to happen, not how risky something feels.
That is the difference between a template that tells you the shape of a good memo and one that shows it.
Where This Fits Next To an AI-Written Memo
A template with a worked example is a starting point for someone building a memo by hand or checking one an AI produced. If the memo itself was AI-generated, the question that matters most is whether every figure in it traces back to a source: a rent roll cell, a T12 line, a named comparable. That question is covered separately.
Start From a Real Address
The fastest way to see the worked example is to run one:
- An address is enough to begin.
- A rent roll and T12 or operating statement sharpen the comparables and the assumptions.
- Anything the public record will not show, such as a pending capital project or a contract price, changes the numbers and is worth supplying up front.
The output is a draft memo built from that run. The analyst's judgment on assumptions, narrative and the final ask stays with the analyst.