Prompts / Working prompt
The 10-Minute Deal Screen
Most deals that land in your inbox don't deserve underwriting hours. They deserve ten minutes and a document request. This is the screen I run before a deal earns a spreadsheet — the job is to find the no fast, not to fall in love.
Where this one comes from
Deals come at me constantly — wholesalers, agents, other investors who know my buy box and know I answer inside 48 hours. Answering fast is the edge, but the only way to answer fast without getting sloppy is to refuse to underwrite things that haven't earned it. A while back a package landed in my inbox that looked great for about four minutes: strong NOI, "taxes stay low," attractive assumable debt. Ten minutes with this screen and the picture changed — the NOI was proforma with no trailing actuals behind it, the tax line was the seller's current assessment (which dies the day you buy at a new price), and the debt terms existed only in the email. Not necessarily a bad deal. But a deal with three stories where documents should be, and stories don't get my underwriting hours.
Two rules do all the work here, and they're the whole discipline: actuals over proforma, always — proforma is what the seller hopes, actuals are what the property does — and no numbers until documents arrive. I don't negotiate against a claim. I ask for the paper behind the claim, and how fast the paper shows up tells you plenty by itself.
The prompt
Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT. It asks for the deal first, your buy box second, then screens in a fixed order and stops early when it hits an automatic no. The output ends with a document request email you can send as-is.
Copy-paste prompt
You are my acquisitions analyst. Someone just sent me a deal and I want a 10-minute screen before I spend hours underwriting it. Your job is to find the reasons to say no fast, not to fall in love with the deal. First, ask me to paste everything I was sent: the listing or deal package text, the email that came with it, every number, every claim. Wait for my answer. Then ask for my buy box: my markets, the property profile I buy (beds, baths, type, condition, strategy), and my hard floor rules (max price, minimum spread or return, anything that is an automatic no). Wait for my answer. Then screen the deal against it, in this exact order: 1. Buy box fit. Does the property qualify at all: market, profile, price range? If it breaks a hard rule, say PASS now, give the one-line reason, and stop. 2. Income. Split every income number into actual collections versus proforma. If the package shows only proforma, flag that in bold: proforma is a projection, not a track record, and I do not buy on it. State what the actuals would need to be for the deal to clear my floor. 3. Expenses. Recompute property taxes at MY purchase price, not the seller's current assessed value, and show the difference. Sanity-check insurance for this market and property age. Flag any expense line that looks below market or is missing entirely: management, maintenance, vacancy, utilities. 4. Debt and structure. List every claim about financing (assumable loan, rate, seller carry, subject-to balance, "lender is flexible") and mark each one NEEDS A DOCUMENT. A claim without a document behind it is a story, and stories do not go in the model. 5. Verdict. Exactly one of three: PURSUE, PASS, or PURSUE WITH CONDITIONS, with the conditions stated precisely. Then the three biggest risks, one line each. Finish by drafting the document request email I send before any number is discussed, asking for exactly these 5 documents: trailing 12 months of actual collections, the current rent roll with lease start and end dates, the most recent property tax bill, the insurance declaration page, and the mortgage statement or payoff letter for any debt that stays in place. Keep the email short, friendly, and firm that pricing conversation starts when the documents arrive.
What you'll get out of it
A verdict in ten minutes instead of a spreadsheet in three hours — and more importantly, a consistent reason for every pass, so you can tell the sender something specific instead of going quiet. The document request email at the end is doing quiet work too: senders with a real deal produce five documents in a day, and senders with a story stop replying, which is the cheapest due diligence you'll ever run. Screen enough deals through it and you'll notice your own buy box getting sharper, because the prompt makes you state it out loud every single time.
The discipline, one line
No numbers until documents arrive. Actuals over proforma, always. The screen just enforces what you already know.
Screening deals by hand every morning?
This prompt is the manual version of something I run wired in: deals arrive by email, get screened against my buy box, and hit my morning brief already sorted. If your deal flow deserves that, it's a build I've done for my own operation first. Twenty minutes and I'll show you what it looks like.
The wired-in version is in Wiring an Assistant Into Your Inbox, Sheets, and CRM, and the buy box method in Building a Buy Box That the Model Actually Follows. More working prompts on the prompts page.