Why we let the IC memo write its own first draft
Pre-engagement, the analyst spent roughly four hours per OM producing a screening memo. Most of those four hours were extraction and formatting. The thinking, the parts that justify the analyst’s salary, took maybe 45 minutes.
The pipeline
OMs land in a shared Drive folder. A worker reads the PDF, pulls the rent roll, T-12, and submarket comps, and drops them into a structured object. A second worker writes the first draft of the screening memo against the firm’s template. The analyst opens the memo and edits.
What the model is good at
- Extracting numbers from inconsistent rent rolls
- Producing a clean comparable set with a methodology note
- Writing the boring sections
- Asking three pointed questions about the deal that the analyst should answer before sending the memo on
What the model is bad at
- Pricing risk
- Reading the seller
- Knowing when a market is rolling over
We do not let it score deals. We let it produce the artifact the analyst would have produced, faster.
Outcomes
Screened 217 deals in 9 weeks vs. 38 the prior quarter. Memo draft time per deal dropped from 4 hours to 35 minutes. IC decisions still human, but the funnel widened.