A new offering memorandum hits your inbox at 9:14 AM. It's a 47-page PDF for a 120-unit multifamily property in Austin. The broker wants preliminary interest by end of day. Your acquisitions team has seen this situation a hundred times — and every time, the same bottleneck appears: someone has to sit down, open the firm's acquisition model template, and spend the next two to four hours manually extracting numbers from the prospectus, plugging them into the right cells, adjusting assumptions, reformatting to match the firm's standards, running the analysis, and checking that nothing broke along the way.
By the time the model is ready for the investment committee to review, half the day is gone. And that's assuming no errors — which, when you're manually transcribing unit mixes, rent rolls, operating expenses, and capital expenditure schedules from a PDF into a spreadsheet, is a generous assumption.
This is the workflow that real estate acquisitions teams are now eliminating with Viete.
The Old Way: Manual Extraction, Manual Entry, Manual Everything
Let's be honest about what the traditional acquisition modeling workflow actually looks like:
- Receive the offering memorandum (OM) — a PDF with property details, financial summaries, rent rolls, operating statements, market comps, and the broker's pro forma projections.
- Open the firm's template — every serious real estate shop has a standardized acquisition model. It's usually an Excel workbook with 10-20 tabs covering everything from the deal summary to the debt schedule to the waterfall distribution.
- Extract data from the OM — this is the painful part. You're reading a formatted PDF and manually typing numbers into Excel. Unit count, unit mix, current rents by unit type, vacancy rates, operating expenses line by line, capital reserves, tax assessments, insurance costs. One wrong number cascades through the entire model.
- Adjust to your assumptions — the broker's pro forma is always optimistic. Your team applies its own rent growth rates, expense inflation, cap rate assumptions, and exit timing. This means overwriting certain cells while preserving others.
- Format and brand — the model needs to look like it came from your firm. Headers, colors, logo placement, disclaimer text, tab naming conventions. Every firm has its own standard, and deviation is not acceptable when it goes to the investment committee or an LP.
- Run the analysis — calculate levered and unlevered returns, IRR, equity multiple, cash-on-cash yields, and the waterfall distribution across the GP/LP structure.
- Verify — check that the balance sheet balances, the debt service coverage ratio makes sense, the exit cap rate produces a reasonable sale price, and the returns tie back to the sources and uses. This is where mistakes from step 3 usually surface.
For a straightforward deal, this process takes 2-4 hours for an experienced analyst. For a complex deal with multiple phases, renovation scenarios, or a joint venture waterfall, it can take a full day. Multiply that by the 5-15 deals a typical acquisitions team evaluates per week, and you begin to understand why analysts burn out and why promising deals sometimes get a late response.
The New Way: Upload, Adapt, Analyze
Here's what that same workflow looks like with Viete:
1. Upload the offering memorandum
Drop the PDF into Viete. The platform reads the entire document — not just the summary page, but the full rent roll, the trailing 12-month operating statement, the capital expenditure schedule, the unit mix breakdown, the tax and insurance detail. It extracts structured data from unstructured PDF pages, handling the formatting inconsistencies that make manual extraction so tedious. Tables that span multiple pages, footnotes with critical assumptions, appendices with market data — Viete processes all of it.
2. Map to your firm's acquisition model
This is where it gets powerful. Viete doesn't just dump the extracted data into a generic template. It maps the data to your firm's specific acquisition model — the one your team has spent years refining. Your tab structure. Your formula logic. Your assumption framework. Your branding.
If your model expects "Effective Gross Income" on row 34 of the Operating tab, that's exactly where it goes. If your unit mix table uses a specific format with columns for unit type, count, average SF, market rent, and loss-to-lease, Viete populates it in that exact structure. The output isn't a Viete template — it's your template, filled in correctly.
3. Apply your standard assumptions
Every firm has a set of baseline assumptions they apply to initial screening: rent growth rate, expense inflation, vacancy stabilization, cap rate range, hold period, leverage terms. Viete applies these automatically while preserving the OM data as a reference layer. You can see exactly what the broker projected versus what your firm's assumptions produce — side by side, in your own model format.
4. Get a fully analyzed, branded output
The result is a complete acquisition model — not a first draft, but a finished, analysis-ready workbook:
- Deal summary with key metrics, pricing, and return highlights
- Rent roll populated with current rents, market rents, and loss-to-lease by unit type
- Operating pro forma with trailing actuals and projected financials
- Debt schedule with your standard financing assumptions and DSCR tracking
- Return analysis — levered IRR, unlevered IRR, equity multiple, cash-on-cash by year
- Waterfall distribution reflecting your fund's GP/LP economics
- Sensitivity tables across cap rate, rent growth, and exit timing
- Branding — your firm's colors, headers, logo, and formatting standards applied throughout
The entire process — from PDF upload to finished model — takes minutes. Not hours. Minutes.
Why This Matters More Than Saving Time
Yes, saving 2-4 hours per deal is significant. At 10 deals per week, that's 20-40 analyst hours recovered — enough to redeploy an entire headcount toward higher-value work. But the time savings, while dramatic, aren't the most important benefit.
Speed to market
In competitive real estate markets, the first credible offer often wins. When a broker sends an OM to 15 firms simultaneously, the team that can evaluate the deal and respond with an informed indication of interest within hours — not days — has a structural advantage. Viete compresses the evaluation cycle so your team can move at the speed the market demands.
Consistency and accuracy
Manual data entry from PDFs is inherently error-prone. Transposing a digit, misreading a unit count, putting an expense in the wrong line item — these mistakes happen regularly, and they compound through the model. When the investment committee asks "are you sure about this 6.2% cap rate?" and the answer is "well, I typed it in from the PDF," that's not confidence-inspiring. Viete's automated extraction eliminates transcription errors entirely. The data in your model matches the source document exactly.
Analytical depth on every deal
When building the model takes four hours, teams naturally cut corners on marginal deals. The property that's "probably not a fit" gets a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation instead of a full analysis. But some of the best acquisitions come from deals that didn't look obvious at first glance — deals where the numbers only get interesting after you model a specific renovation scenario or an alternative financing structure. When every deal gets a full model in minutes, your team can afford to analyze everything thoroughly. You stop missing opportunities because the modeling burden forced triage.
Standardization across the team
In firms with multiple analysts, model quality varies. Different people have slightly different habits — one analyst rounds differently, another uses a different vacancy assumption convention, a third formats the summary tab slightly differently. Over time, these small inconsistencies make it difficult to compare deals on an apples-to-apples basis. Viete enforces your firm's standard automatically, every time. The model that comes out for a 50-unit garden-style property in Phoenix has exactly the same structure, logic, and formatting as the one for a 300-unit high-rise in Miami.
What About the Judgment Calls?
A valid concern: real estate acquisition modeling isn't just data entry. It requires judgment — about which operating expenses are above or below market, about what renovation budget is realistic, about whether the broker's rent projections are achievable.
Viete doesn't replace that judgment. It removes the mechanical work around the judgment so your team can focus entirely on the decisions that actually matter. Instead of spending three hours getting the model built and 30 minutes thinking about the deal, the ratio inverts: 10 minutes to get the model built, three hours to evaluate the opportunity, tour the property, analyze the submarket, and stress-test scenarios.
The analyst's role shifts from "person who builds spreadsheets" to "person who evaluates investments." That's what they were hired to do.
How Teams Are Setting It Up
The setup process is straightforward:
- Upload your firm's existing acquisition model — the Excel template your team currently uses. Viete learns its structure, formulas, formatting, and conventions.
- Define your standard assumptions — baseline rent growth, expense inflation, target leverage, hold period, cap rate ranges. These become the defaults applied to every new deal.
- Start uploading OMs. Each new prospectus generates a complete, populated model ready for review and refinement.
There's no migration, no workflow disruption, and no learning curve for the rest of the team. The output is an Excel file — the same format everyone already works in. Analysts who receive the populated model can modify it exactly as they would any other spreadsheet. The formulas are transparent, the structure is familiar, and every number is traceable to the source document.
The Competitive Edge Compounds
The firms adopting this approach aren't just faster — they're systematically building an advantage that compounds over time. Every deal gets full analytical treatment. Responses go out the same day the OM arrives. The investment committee sees consistently formatted, thoroughly checked models instead of rushed work with manual entry errors. And the acquisitions team — instead of being buried in spreadsheet mechanics — is spending its time on market analysis, relationship building, and creative deal structuring.
The offering memorandum that used to trigger a four-hour modeling exercise now triggers a four-minute one. The rest of the day belongs to the work that actually wins deals.