Screening is the decision to not spend underwriting time. It works when it is fast, consistent, and honest about why a deal was dropped. It is one stage of due diligence, done before the expensive work, and the zoning check in step one rests on how zoning works in the United States: the district decides which uses are permitted.
Written by the Titleman team with AI assistance (Claude). Reviewed by Titleman's SEO/GEO review desk (AI-assisted, not independent of Titleman) before it went live. Links checked and page updated 13 October 2026. Titleman sells a screening product described below.
Many acquisition teams screen well on the deals they look at closely and less well on the rest. The pipeline arrives faster than anyone can read it, the obvious deals get attention, and the remainder are passed on for reasons nobody wrote down.
Screen In Order Of What A Check Costs
The point of a screen is to reject early, so the cheap checks come first. Running them in the wrong order is how teams spend a day on a deal that zoning rules out.
- Is the property what the offering says it is? Parcel identity and boundary against the property record, ownership, and the zoning district with its permitted uses. This check often ends the conversation, and it is usually the cheapest one available.
- Is the price defensible against evidence? Recent transactions of genuinely similar assets nearby, and what they imply per unit of area. A price far outside that range needs an explanation before anything else is worth doing.
- Does the income story hold? In-place rents against market rents, lease terms remaining, concessions, and how much of the return depends on rolling a tenant.
- Does the structure work? Only now: financing, capital plan, timing, and returns.
Because the first two checks are the cheapest, a deal that fails one of them costs little to drop. Starting at step four spends the expensive work first.
The checks in order
On the price check in step two: a defensible price is anchored to comparable evidence, as in the standard real estate appraisal approaches; a screen borrows that logic at lower cost and lower precision.
| Step | Question | Evidence | Typical reject reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Is the property what the offering says? | Parcel, ownership, zoning district | Use not permitted; wrong parcel |
| 2 | Is the price defensible? | Recent similar transactions nearby | Price outside the evidence |
| 3 | Does the income hold? | In-place vs market rent, lease terms | Dependence on one expiring lease |
| 4 | Does the structure work? | Financing, capital plan, returns | Returns miss the hurdle |
A Worked Example: One Offering Memorandum Through The Screen
The figures are made up for illustration; the property is described only by type and size.
The buy box (written down before any deal arrives): industrial, 20,000 to 60,000 square feet, price $3M to $8M, going-in cap rate at least 6.5%, price per square foot within the range of recent comparable sales.
The deal: a 30,000 square foot warehouse offered at $4,200,000, which is $140 per square foot, with in-place NOI of $283,500: a 6.75% cap rate.
| Step | Finding | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Is it what the OM says? | Parcel matches the record; zoning permits warehouse use | Pass |
| 2. Is the price defensible? | Three recent comparable sales at $105, $118 and $125 per square foot; the ask is $15 above the highest | Reject |
| 3. Does the income hold? | Not reached | |
| 4. Does the structure work? | Not reached |
The deal passes the buy box on size, price band and cap rate, and still fails: $140 per square foot against comparable sales of $105 to $125. The recorded reason is that sentence, so if the seller comes back at $3,750,000 ($125 per square foot, a 7.56% cap rate on the same NOI), the screen can be rerun from step 2 instead of from memory.
The Checks That Kill Deals
A small number of findings end a deal outright, and they are worth testing explicitly rather than hoping they surface:
- The zoning does not permit the use the plan assumes.
- The parcel is not the parcel in the offering: a common failure when an address matches loosely and the legal description does not.
- The comparable set used to justify price is made of listings, not transactions.
- Environmental, flood or title conditions that a lender will not accept.
- Income that depends on a single tenant whose lease is nearly over.
None of these require underwriting to find. All of them are expensive to find late.
Consistency Is The Part Software Actually Fixes
A screen is not hard. Applying the same screen to every deal, when the pipeline is a hundred deals and three people, is hard.
Titleman applies the same sequence to each address and assembles the evidence behind it: parcel and zoning on record, transactions that are named rather than summarised, and the market context around the asset. Where a figure is an estimate, it says so; where evidence is thin, it says that instead of producing a confident number.
The buy-box check compares the deal's facts against your own criteria, and each fact carries the document and page it came from. A fact that cannot be found is marked as no data, with the document to ask for; it is never counted as a pass, never as a fail, and never filled from a market average.
The output is a stated reason, not just a verdict. A deal rejected on a zoning finding can be revisited when the code changes. A deal rejected because "it didn't feel right" cannot.
Criteria Should Be Yours, And Written Down
Screening criteria are only useful if they are the ones your investment committee will really apply. The common set:
- Asset type, size, and vintage.
- Market and submarket, with any exclusions stated.
- Price per unit of area against comparable evidence.
- Going-in yield, and the spread to your cost of capital.
- The gap between in-place and market rent.
- Weighted lease term remaining, and tenant concentration.
- Hard exclusions: zoning, environmental, flood, title.
Writing them down has a second effect. When a screen rejects something the team later regrets, the criteria are visible and can be argued with, rather than being reconstructed from memory.
What Screening Does Not Decide
A screen advances a deal. It does not approve one.
- It does not replace underwriting, and a deal that survives a screen has not been proven.
- It does not replace legal, environmental or engineering diligence.
- It does not replace a formal valuation where one is required.
- Property records carry errors, and a screen inherits them; the findings that matter get verified before capital moves.
What it does is make sure the underwriting hours go to the deals worth them, and that every rejection has a reason somebody can look up.
Related reading
- real estate due diligence software
- from deal sourcing to underwriting
- real estate deal analysis software
FAQ
How do you quickly screen real estate deals?
Screen in a fixed order, cheapest check first: confirm the parcel and what may be built on it, test the asking price against recent comparable transactions, check the income story against the market, and only then look at structure and returns.
What criteria should a screening model use?
Criteria should be the ones your committee will actually apply: asset type and size, market and submarket, price per unit of area against comparable evidence, going-in yield, the gap between in-place and market rent, lease term remaining, and any hard exclusions such as zoning, flood exposure or title condition.
What is the difference between screening and underwriting?
Screening decides whether a deal deserves underwriting. It is fast, uses property-record and market evidence, and is designed to reject. Underwriting is the detailed work of proving the deal, and it costs days rather than minutes, so it should only be spent on deals that have already survived a screen.
How many deals should a screen reject?
It depends on how tight the buy box is, and the number is worth tracking. A screen that advances nearly everything is not screening; a screen that rejects nearly everything is usually applying criteria the team does not really hold. The value of a screen is that the rejections are fast, consistent, and carry a stated reason someone can revisit.