Due diligence
What commercial real estate due diligence actually involves.
Commercial real estate due diligence is the work of establishing what an asset is, who owns and controls it, what it earns and costs, what encumbers it, what its market supports, and what remains unknown — before money or a commitment moves. Preliminary due diligence is the evidence-gathering and analysis stage. Final due diligence is the confirmed, human-released stage on which a transaction is decided.
The problem
The evidence is real, and it is scattered
The facts that decide a commercial transaction sit in property and ownership records, company registries, planning and zoning files, permits and violations, mortgage and financing records, transaction histories, litigation dockets, market evidence, operating information, broker material, documents and jurisdiction-specific sources — each in its own format, each on its own schedule, and frequently disagreeing with one another.
Most of the cost of diligence is not judgement. It is assembly, and then re-assembly when someone asks where a figure came from.
The stages
Preliminary and final are different acts
- Preliminary: the asset is resolved, evidence is gathered and preserved, competing explanations are tested, contradictions and gaps are named, and clearly labelled market-supported scenarios stand in where operating information is unavailable.
- Final: documents are taken in, figures are reconciled against the record, adjustments are proposed and approved by a person, every preliminary question is closed with evidence or a written note, and the paper is released by a named human.
- The boundary is a control in the product, not a sentence in a disclaimer: PropTrova prepares; a person releases.
What a defensible paper carries
Provenance, uncertainty and open matters
- Observed evidence: what an underlying source actually establishes.
- Inference: a conclusion the evidence supports without stating outright — labelled as such.
- Preliminary calculation: deterministic arithmetic over stated inputs and assumptions.
- Conflict: material evidence that disagrees, left visible rather than resolved silently.
- Unresolved question: what the available evidence cannot settle, and what that limits.
- Human-confirmed input: information supplied or confirmed by an authorised person, attributed to them.
What this does not do
Stated limits
Due diligence is not a single product and no platform completes it alone. Legal, valuation, environmental, structural and tax work remain specialist tasks. PropTrova prepares the evidence and the arithmetic those specialists and their clients rely on, and states where the record does not reach.
See what PropTrova can establish about an opportunity.
Access is granted to working commercial real estate teams while the design-partner programme is under way.