A BOV is usually produced under time pressure, for a pitch, by someone who already has a view of the price. That combination is what makes most of them weak: the number is decided early and the analysis assembled behind it, which a sceptical owner can feel even when they cannot point at the flaw.
The work is also genuinely repetitive. Pulling a rent roll into a unit mix, coding a T-12 into an operating summary, assembling a comparable set, and formatting the result absorbs most of the hours — and none of it is where a broker's judgement adds value. A 100-unit multifamily BOV built by hand typically takes one to three days, and the great majority of that is data handling.
Take the rent roll and record the date it was run. Every lease analytic in the document — WALT, expirations, month-to-month exposure, occupancy — is measured from that date, and a document that does not state it leaves the reader unable to tell what period the income describes. If the roll is more than a quarter old, get a current one rather than aging it forward.
Group units by floorplan, then establish occupancy, in-place rents and asking rents. The gap between the two is the loss to lease, and it is the single most useful figure in the document: it is where the upside is, and it is the thing an owner most wants a second opinion on.
Take the trailing twelve months and map every line to a standard head, so that the expenses in this BOV are comparable to the expenses in the last one. Reconcile the coded total back to the statement's own stated NOI — a spread that does not tie to its source is not yet evidence.
Pull rent comps and sale comps, each with its date, price, price per unit or per square foot, and location. Measure the distance from the subject rather than asserting it. A comparable whose distance is a guess is the first thing a reader will test, and the fastest way to lose the room.
Project the income from gross potential rent down through loss to lease, vacancy and operating expenses to NOI, then derive value from the going-in cap the comparable sales actually support. Keep the assumptions visible as their own section — exit cap, growth, vacancy — because the value conclusion is only as arguable as the assumptions behind it.
Show what the value does when the cap rate moves 25 basis points either way. A single figure implies a precision nobody has; a range is both more honest and more persuasive. Write the executive summary only once the analysis exists, so the conclusion follows the work rather than the work following the conclusion.
Every step above is worth doing; only the last of them is worth a broker's afternoon. In Crevanta the six steps come out of the property's own record — the unit mix and lease analytics anchored to the rent roll's as-of date, an operating summary that ties to the statement it came from, a pro forma with its returns and a sensitivity grid, and a comparable set whose distances are measured rather than asserted.
Sections are chosen per document, so a two-page pricing opinion and a full marketing package come from the same record. Where an input does not exist — no comparables assembled, no location analysis — the section is omitted rather than filled with a placeholder. What is left for the broker is the part that was always theirs: which comparables genuinely apply, and what the market is actually paying.
Automate This Workflow
Crevanta provides the extraction and structuring foundation that makes CRE workflow automation possible.