Why Your OM Takes 4 Hours (And How to Cut That in Half)

Ask any investment sales broker what they'd rather be doing with 4 hours and you'll get the same answer: prospecting, showing properties, closing deals. Not formatting documents.

But that's where the time goes. A typical offering memorandum requires property data assembly, financial modeling, market research, comparable analysis, and then — the part that takes longest — making it all look professional enough that an investor takes it seriously.

Where the Time Actually Goes

We tracked the process across 50 OM productions. Here's the breakdown:

Data gathering and entry: ~45 minutes. Pulling property details, tenant info, financials from multiple sources into one place.

Financial analysis: ~30 minutes. Building the pro forma, calculating cap rates, modeling scenarios. This is the part that actually requires expertise.

Market research: ~30 minutes. Comps, demographics, market conditions, traffic counts.

Writing and narrative: ~45 minutes. Executive summary, property description, investment highlights. The persuasive layer.

Formatting and design: ~90 minutes. This is the killer. Making tables align, photos fit, branding consistent, page breaks clean. Pure production work.

That's 4 hours, and formatting alone eats 37% of it.

The Formatting Trap

Here's what's frustrating: the formatting work has zero correlation with deal quality. A perfectly formatted OM doesn't make a better investment. But a poorly formatted one does make investors question your professionalism.

So brokers are trapped. Skip the formatting and look sloppy. Do the formatting and lose half a day.

Some shops solve this with in-house marketing teams. That works if you're a large brokerage with the overhead budget. For independent brokers and small firms, that's not an option.

What AI Actually Changes

AI doesn't replace the broker's market knowledge or deal instinct. What it replaces is the production work — the data assembly, the formatting, the boilerplate writing.

With the right tool, the process looks different:

Data entry: 10 minutes. Input the key property details once.

AI generation: 2 minutes. Property description, investment highlights, market context — all drafted from the inputs.

Broker review and refinement: 20 minutes. This is where expertise matters. Adjusting the narrative, adding deal-specific insights, correcting anything the AI got wrong.

Total: ~30 minutes for a polished, investor-ready document.

That's not a marginal improvement. It's a structural change in how brokers allocate their time.

The Real ROI

If a broker produces 3 OMs per week and saves 3 hours each, that's 9 hours per week freed up. At a blended rate of $200/hour in deal value, that's $1,800/week in recaptured capacity.

Over a year, that's $93,600 worth of time that was being spent on document production.

The brokers who adopt this early don't just save time. They take on more listings because the bottleneck of OM production is gone.

That's what DealDraft is built for. Not to replace the broker's judgment — to remove the production tax on every deal they touch.