At Smart Capital Center, we believe the future of commercial real estate (CRE) investing lies in speed, accuracy, and intelligence at scale. Our recent webinar brought together leading investment firms and underwriting teams from across the US — from institutional investors to asset managers — for a live demonstration of AI-powered underwriting in action.

The session featured a real-world retail case study: La Jolla Village Square, a landmark shopping center located in San Diego, California. By applying AI and Deep Research to this asset, we showcased how underwriting can move from days of manual reconciliation to real-time analysis, empowering teams to underwrite much faster, with confidence.  

“Unlike horizontal AI tools, Smart Capital Center is built exclusively for commercial real estate. Every capability—from financial data ingestion to risk monitoring—is designed for CRE documents, workflows, and investment use cases.” - Hannah Kidd, Senior Financial Associate, Smart Capital Center

Here are the key takeaways from this session:  

Underwriting is reimagined with AI co-pilots

Traditional underwriting requires countless hours of manual data entry, reconciliations, and document review. With Smart Capital Center, financial statements, rent rolls, appraisals, and OMs are ingested and standardized in minutes.  

Every analysis remains fully transparent and subject to analyst review. Firms can tailor how underwriting is performed, preserving their unique models, benchmarks, and ‘secret sauce’ while accelerating the manual parts that slow down execution.

Analysts retain full transparency — every data point links back to its source document — while gaining immediate variance analyses, visualizations, and reconciliations.

“You can think of us as your co-pilot in commercial real estate — helping you make smarter, faster decisions with real-time data, AI-powered underwriting, and unmatched market intelligence.” – Garrett Brewer, Director of Sales, Smart Capital Center

The full lifecycle of CRE is automated

Smart Capital Center isn’t just a point solution. It’s an end-to-end platform covering origination, underwriting, portfolio monitoring, loan management, risk analysis, and disposition. By embedding AI across the investment lifecycle, firms can process more deals, identify risks earlier, and execute faster.

Smart Capital clients — including JLL, RMR Group, Tremont, and KeyBank — are already seeing this transformation. These teams are streamlining their workflows with AI-powered underwriting, real-time market intelligence, and automated reporting that replaces hours of manual work with transparent, source-linked insights.

AI Deep Research surfaces hidden signals

Generative AI goes beyond data extraction. Smart Capital Center continuously scans market data, regulatory shifts, and tenant news to surface signals that would be nearly impossible to track manually at scale. For example, if a major retailer like Nordstrom declares bankruptcy, the system proactively flags which properties and portfolios are impacted.

This is especially powerful in two critical workflows:

1. During acquisitions – When a property is being screened by investment and underwriting teams at private equity firms, operators, or lenders, the quality of the rent roll is everything. AI Deep Research adds a new dimension to diligence by connecting tenant exposure to real-time market and credit events, allowing for higher-quality analysis than what’s possible with manual review.

2. During asset management – Once an asset is acquired, surveillance analysts and asset managers at private equity firms, debt funds, and other CRE investors use Smart Capital Center for continuous monitoring. AI agents operate in the background, scanning for tenant credit events, regulatory changes, and market movements — turning monitoring into a proactive defense of NOI and risk-adjusted returns.

The result: workflows shift from reactive to proactive, in real-time. Teams gain intelligence to protect cash flow, mitigate tenant risk early, and uncover opportunities long before competitors.  

Introducing Smarty: Your AI analyst

Meet Smarty, the AI analyst built specifically for CRE. Unlike a generic chatbot, Smarty has full context of your portfolio, properties, tenants, and financials. It doesn’t just retrieve data — it reasons over it, runs scenarios, and explains results in plain language.

What teams can ask Smarty:

• Underwriting teams can type: “Show me variance drivers in this property’s last three operating statements.” Smarty instantly highlights expense fluctuations (e.g., seasonal utilities or tax changes) and explains their impact.

• Acquisition teams can ask: “What are the largest tenant exposures across this deal’s rent roll?” Smarty breaks it down by tenant, industry, and credit quality, surfacing hidden concentrations of risk.

• Asset managers can query: “What happens if occupancy drops by 5%?” Smarty runs a scenario analysis on NOI, DSCR, and IRR, projecting outcomes in real-time.

• Capital markets teams can request: “Generate a SWOT for this property.” Smarty synthesizes financial data, market comps, news, and regulatory updates to instantly produce a deal-specific SWOT analysis.

Areas in the investment lifecycle where Smarty is most useful:

• Pre-deal screening and underwriting – Accelerates diligence by answering questions that would normally take hours of modeling and reconciliation.

• Portfolio monitoring – Operates like a 24/7 analyst, surfacing early warnings (lease expirations, tenant distress, covenant risk) so teams can act proactively.

• Investment memo generation and reporting – Produces draft investment memos, ASRs, and portfolio reports in minutes, pulling directly from source documents and real-time benchmarks.

Smarty’s significance and scale of benefits:

Instead of weeks of back-and-forth analysis, Smarty enables on-demand, institutional-grade answers in seconds. For CRE investment teams managing hundreds of properties, the scale is unmatched: one AI Smarty assistant effectively functions like 100 analysts working around the clock, delivering immediate insights without increasing headcount.

Productivity scales with a 24/7 AI workforce

Smart Capital Center equips teams with a limitless AI workforce — 100x agents working around the clock. This doesn’t replace people; it empowers them. Underwriters and analysts shift from repetitive tasks to higher-value decision-making.

Early adopters of the software such as KeyBank are reporting dramatically faster financial model preparation and significant time savings across underwriting workflows.  

Real-world impact: Speed, scale, ROI

Clients like JLL, RMR Group, and KeyBank are experiencing measurable, game-changing results with Smart Capital Center.

Fernando Salazar, Director of Asset Management at JLL, shared:  

“Instead of the 30–40 minutes it took us previously to process a single financial statement, now it takes 1–3 minutes with Smart Capital Center.”  

That’s a 30x productivity gain in one of the most repetitive but critical workflows of underwriting and asset management.  

Other early adopters are reporting similar impact:

• KeyBank achieved a 40% reduction in time required to prepare financial models for loans, accelerating execution while maintaining accuracy.

• RMR Group saw underwriting cycles shrink dramatically, freeing analysts to focus on strategy rather than manual reconciliations.

• Across private equity firms, debt funds, and operators, teams are processing more deals in parallel without adding headcount — meaning stronger pipeline coverage and faster time-to-capital deployment.

These gains translate directly into scale, speed, and ROI. Analysts and asset managers shift from manual data entry to higher-value decision-making. Firms move from reactive monitoring to proactive intelligence. And leadership teams gain the confidence of knowing every decision is grounded in source-linked, AI-powered analysis.  

Market intelligence and tenant analytics

In the live demo of La Jolla Village Square, Smart Capital Center presented a comprehensive property history that included ownership changes and mortgage records. This was combined with detailed market intelligence such as demographics, business statistics, location popularity, amenities, and foot traffic—all layered into a single, unified market view.

Tenant analytics added another dimension by enabling real-time monitoring of financial exposure, tenant operating and financial performance, industry health, and even online sentiment.  

“If there’s any negative news affecting a tenant, the analyst or asset manager gets notified right away so you can act immediately.” – Hannah Kidd, Senior Financial Associate, Smart Capital Center  

DCF assumptions and Deep Research

Traditional DCF models rely on static assumptions—rent growth, occupancy projections, operating expenses, and market comps—that often lag behind real conditions. Smart Capital Center transforms this process by embedding Deep Research directly into underwriting.

With Deep Research, every DCF assumption can be tested against real-time market data, benchmarks, research reports, and local comps. For instance, when analysts model revenue growth or expense ratios, the system cross-checks inputs against thousands of comparable properties in the same submarket, the latest reports, online sources, and connected proprietary databases.

The result is underwriting that is no longer anchored in outdated assumptions but grounded in dynamic, hyper-local, evidence-based intelligence.  

How it works in practice:

• AI analysts review rent rolls, financial statements, and offering memorandums (OMs), then layer in external signals like tenant news, regulatory updates, and demographic trends.

• Variance drivers (e.g., rising utility costs, local tax changes, or vacancy shifts) are automatically surfaced, along with explanations for how they affect NOI and long-term value.

• Analysts can benchmark assumptions — cap rates, lease rollover expectations, expense growth — against live market comps and property-level data, building confidence in both upside and downside scenarios.

This combination of DCF modeling and AI Deep Research brings a level of precision and defensibility that manual methods cannot match. Underwriting moves from being a “best guess” exercise to a data-backed projection, helping firms not only price risk more accurately but also identify hidden opportunities in the assumptions themselves.

Scenario modeling and Excel integration

The system automatically builds pro formas and DCFs while integrating seamlessly with existing Excel models, Argus, or other databases. This allows analysts to maintain their familiar workflows while gaining the benefits of automation and full transparency.

All results can be exported back to Excel, ensuring investment teams can continue to use their preferred models and reporting templates without disruption.

Generative AI further enhances financial analysis by comparing performance across periods and explaining the underlying drivers of change. For example, the system can highlight whether a variance stems from seasonal utility costs, tax adjustments, or other operating factors—turning raw numbers into actionable insight.  

AI-Powered financial analysis: Beyond the numbers

Financial analysis is more than just pulling together statements—it’s about explaining what’s happening, anticipating what’s coming, and giving teams actionable insight. Smart Capital Center applies AI to do exactly that across underwriting, monitoring, reporting, and risk management.

What AI-driven financial analysis looks like in operations:

• Variance reporting: Automatically compares actuals vs forecasts across revenue, expenses, and NOI. But rather than just reporting that “expenses rose 15%,” the platform surfaces why: e.g. deferred maintenance catching up, change in vendor contracts, or local utility price shifts.  

• Multi-source intelligence: Pulls data not only from financial statements, but rent rolls, appraisals, inspection reports, and unstructured sources (e.g. tenant communications, market/regulatory news) to contextualize what’s changing.

• Interactive commentary: The system doesn’t just output tables—it generates interactive narrative explanations. Users can further drill down: “Why did payroll increase?” or “Is our marketing spend typical for this region?” and Smarty AI will respond with more detailed commentary. These stories connect the dots.

Investment teams who benefit most:  

• Acquisition analysts: Can screen incoming deals from brokers or sellers more efficiently.

• Underwriters: Conduct deeper reviews once a deal passes initial screening.

• Asset managers and reporting analysts: Generate monthly or quarterly portfolio variance reports in minutes instead of hours.

• Portfolio analysts: Gain standardized insights across assets for reliable comparisons and trend spotting.

• Portfolio managers: Are now able to perform annual portfolio valuations internally, with greater quality and detail, rather than outsourcing.

Real-time impact of AI across financial analysis:

• Reporting cycles shrink dramatically – Insights that once took hours or even days are now delivered in real time or near real time.

• Consistency improves – Commentary is standardized, narratives are source-linked, and explanations are fully transparent. This builds confidence with internal teams, external stakeholders (lenders, investors), and audit or governance functions.

• Risks are identified earlier – Expense anomalies, tenant turnover, and market shifts that might have gone unnoticed until the end of a reporting period are flagged proactively.

• Quality of analysis increases – Deep Research connects data from dozens of sources, uncovering hidden patterns and emerging trends that manual reviews would likely miss.

Why the AI shift to financial analysis matters:
Financial analysis is no longer just about understanding the past—it’s about influencing the future. When you understand why numbers moved, you can better forecast, adjust assumptions in your models or DCF, and act before small issues become big problems. That means more defensible valuations, more accurate underwriting, and greater agility in portfolios.

“Because Smart Capital Center is designed for CRE only, every insight—whether on rent rolls, variance analysis, or tenant exposure—is tailored to the realities of real estate investing. This ensures analysis is not just fast, but also contextually relevant to acquisitions, and asset management.” - Garrett Brewer, Director of Sales, Smart Capital Center.

Built for security and compliance

A frequent question: Is my data safe?
Yes. At Smart Capital Center, we understand that for CRE firms, data security isn’t optional—it’s foundational. That’s why our platform is engineered with enterprise-grade protections, strict compliance, and transparent accountability baked in at every layer.

“All the information you upload is secure and just for you. We currently work with regulated entities such as banks, insurance companies and government agencies.” – Garrett Brewer, Director of Sales, Smart Capital Center

Everything is certified and tested

• We hold SOC 2 Type 2 / ISAE-3000 compliance and related frameworks. This means regular audits, strict control over process, infrastructure, and risk management.Full control over models and usage

• You decide which AI models to use. Whether it’s your own private LLMs, third-party providers, or our internal AI, you maintain control, and nothing leaks to public AI model training.

“This flexibility allows CRE investors to decide how AI is applied in their underwriting and asset management process, ensuring proprietary methodologies remain private and fully under their control.” - Hannah Kidd, Senior Financial Associate, Smart Capital Center

From reactive to proactive: The Smart Capital difference

One of the biggest shifts AI brings to CRE underwriting and asset management is moving firms from reactive workflows to proactive intelligence. Instead of waiting for quarterly reports or lagging data, Smart Capital Center equips teams to anticipate risks and act on opportunities in real time.

With Smart Capital, investment teams gain a proactive edge through:

• Real-time risk alerts – The platform continuously monitors tenant credit events, lease exposures, and market shifts, flagging risks before they escalate.

• Scenario-based projections – Teams can instantly model changes in rent growth, occupancy, or expenses to see impacts on NOI, DSCR, and IRR—without waiting for new reports.

• Always-on AI analysts – A 24/7 digital workforce reviews financials, reconciles rent rolls, and surfaces insights around the clock, multiplying analyst capacity without adding headcount.

• Market and tenant intelligence – Deep Research connects regulatory updates, news, and tenant developments directly to portfolios, uncovering exposures that would be missed in manual workflows.

• Source-linked transparency – Every alert, projection, and analysis ties back to original documents and benchmarks, giving leadership confidence to act quickly and decisively.

The result is a shift from lagging reactions to proactive decision-making—helping CRE firms protect returns, move faster on deals, and spot opportunities before competitors.

The future of underwriting is in real-time, Deep Research  

AI in CRE isn’t a someday story—it is here now. With Smart Capital Center, acquisitions, underwriting and asset management evolve from manual, reactive processes to real-time, proactive intelligence. Investment teams see measurable gains such as 30x faster financial processing and up to 80% percent less time to prepare models, all while preserving human judgment, proprietary methodologies, and existing workflows.  

Purpose-built for commercial real estate, the platform empowers investors, asset managers, and lenders to act decisively, scale with confidence, and uncover opportunities before competitors. The future of underwriting lies in real-time deep research—and it has already begun.

If you are ready to see how AI-powered underwriting can elevate your workflow, schedule a personalized demo with our team today.

‍