Screening is the decision to not spend underwriting time. It works when it is fast, consistent, and honest about why a deal was dropped.
Most acquisition teams screen well on the deals they look at closely and badly 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 public record, ownership, and the zoning district with its permitted uses. This is the check that most often ends the conversation, and it is 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.
Steps one and two decide the majority of rejections. Teams that begin at step four discover this after the work is done.
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 from the public 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 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.
- Public 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.