Acquisition teams receive opportunities in different formats, with the most important information spread across broker emails, offering memorandums, attachments, and follow-up correspondence. Before a deal can receive a serious underwriting review, someone must find the relevant details, enter them into a screening model, and determine whether the opportunity fits the firm’s strategy.
The criteria may include location, property type, parcel size, zoning, flood zone, utilities, wetlands, nearby oil and gas wells, rail access, building age, renovations, occupancy, net operating income, parking, freeway access, jurisdiction, site shape, adjacent land uses, square footage, rent per square foot, tenant-improvement allowance, hard and soft costs, and target yield on cost. Manual screening is slow, inconsistent, and difficult to track across the full pipeline.
First Look creates a structured intake and screening workflow for every opportunity. When an offering memorandum arrives in a monitored inbox—or when a team member uploads it manually—the platform parses the document, extracts the available property and financial data, and compares each item against the firm’s configured acquisition criteria.
Every screening field is customizable. A firm can define the desired value or threshold, assign a weight based on its importance, and designate a field as a knockout criterion when failure should automatically remove the opportunity from consideration. First Look then presents a red, yellow, or green result so the acquisitions team can see where a deal fits, where it needs review, and where it falls outside the mandate.
The screening model reflects the firm’s strategy rather than forcing every opportunity into a generic scorecard. Teams choose the fields that matter, define acceptable ranges, set weights, and identify non-negotiable conditions. The resulting screen gives reviewers both an overall direction and the underlying criteria behind it.
First Look keeps opportunities moving through a defined acquisition pipeline: New, Screening, back-of-the-napkin analysis, Under Review, Pursuing, and later-stage underwriting. Teams can see where each opportunity stands, what has already been reviewed, and which deals require the next action.
Historical opportunities and completed analyses can be loaded into a comparable-deals database, giving the team a reusable reference set for future screening. A broker directory keeps important relationships and deal sources connected to the opportunity record, making it easier to recognize recurring brokers and maintain the right contacts.
