What should a CRE loan pre-screen check before an underwriter starts?
A pre-screen applies the parts of your credit policy that can be tested from the submission itself. The OCC's Commercial Real Estate Lending handbook says lending policies should "provide clear and measurable underwriting standards," and lists what effective CRE policies set for each loan or property type, including "Minimum standards for borrower or project net worth, support provided by guarantees (if applicable), borrower and guarantor cash flow, and debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR)," "LTV limits by property type," and "Minimum debt yield."
Those standards split into two groups. Some are knockouts: property type, loan type, size and geography. A deal that misses one of these can be declined from the offering memorandum. Leverage above the policy maximum is usually an exception to approve or restructure rather than a knockout. The rest need numbers from the package: sponsor liquidity and net worth, in-place cash flow, the budget and equity. A good pre-screen tells the underwriter which group each finding belongs to.
The same handbook lists "Minimum standards of documentation consistent with the type of lending performed." A pre-screen is where those standards are cheapest to enforce, because a missing rent roll or a stale personal financial statement is requested once, at intake, rather than discovered halfway through underwriting.
How does DealScreen screen a deal?
DealScreen runs on the MightyBot platform. Your credit box and documentation standards are written as plain-English policies, with a profile for each property and loan type. When a package arrives, the agent classifies and splits the files, extracts the values each policy needs, and pre-fills the intake record.
Knockout rules run first. A deal that fails one gets a drafted decline with the policy clause behind each miss, which your team approves and sends, so the sponsor or broker hears a specific reason. Deals inside the box move to cross-document checks: the personal financial statement against the schedule of real estate owned, sources against uses, entity names across every document, and each file against its freshness window.
The output is a screening memo for the underwriter. Hard stops come first, then flags, then missing items, and every finding opens the page it came from. Public-record lookups record the source and the retrieval time, and a name match alone is never treated as a finding. Your team makes the pursue-or-decline decision.
What does the guidance say about sponsors, guarantors and borrower-prepared studies?
The OCC handbook says "The bank should obtain appropriate financial information on the borrower(s) and guarantor(s), as applicable, including income, liquidity, cash flow, contingent liabilities, and other relevant information to support sound underwriting." It is direct about stated figures: "Guarantor liquidity should be verified by the bank." A pre-screen can reconcile what the sponsor reports; verification stays with your credit team, and the memo says which figures are still unverified.
Borrower-supplied analysis gets the same treatment. The handbook notes that "feasibility studies commissioned by the borrower may be biased and should be critically reviewed," and that "the bank should conduct its own analysis of the project." DealScreen marks which inputs came from the sponsor's own materials so the underwriter knows where independent work is needed.
Exceptions matter at examination time. The handbook says examiners "should review lending policy exception reports to assess the frequency and nature of policy exceptions and to determine whether exceptions to the bank's loan policy are adequately documented, approved, reported." When every screened deal carries its policy tests and exceptions from intake, that report comes from the record rather than from memory.