Tips on putting together first OM
Hey guys, 

I’ve read through many OM’s but I’m about to put one together from scratch for a three building office park. 

Just looking for tips or suggestions on what definitely needs to be in it. I’ve read some OMs that are 40 pages and some that are 7 pages. 

Thoughts?
[{"id": "edt6qzh", "text": "Typically most seven page documents for an investment property are an offering summary. This document allows you to put the basics and broadcast it widely without requiring an NDA. Most leading firm\u2019s OMs are going to be in the twenty page region, require an NDA to review, and will contain full details on the property including confidential information such as lease terms, full financial breakdown, etc.\n\nAs a broker, I will look at any OM, however we have found the mid-length/longer OMs that are high quality (nice images, borders, graphs, made in Photoshop, etc.) are typically better received by the general public searching Loopnet and therefore offer a better chance of not paying a co-op. Additionally, the higher quality OMs show prospective clients you have the resources and knowledge to compete with leading investment firms like M&amp;M.\n\nLast thing I\u2019ll mention, if a brokerage has a short, low quality OM (such as sending over a scanned Xcel sheet) I\u2019ve seen those properties languish on the market far longer than they should. The OM should communicate everything a potential buyer needs to know about the property. Anything less and the property risks being passed over or you open yourself to being bombarded with calls from prospects - not as good as it sounds as I\u2019ve found there are a great deal of flakey investment property prospects generally not worth your time, and these prospects are probably annoyed they\u2019re having to call you for simple information missing from your OM.", "replies": [{"id": "edt7ob8", "text": "Do you feel like the length of the narrative is helpful or is the higher quality presentation what matters? \n\nFor example, I'm not sure if it is necessary to go into why the west Los Angeles apartment market is a great apartment market. I'd expect most market participants to know that.", "replies": [{"id": "edt9h2y", "text": "Is the property one that could attract national (or even international) buyers, or is it likely to be purchased by a local group? If the first is possible, a strong, one page narrative on your OM could be greatly helpful. We have been too wordy in the past so we have a rule that any narrative cannot be longer than a page of an OM (with supporting graphs or images following as needed). Given our OMs are in binder style (horizontal) and we have nice borders, this typically means 4 paragraphs is all you get for any narration.\n\nI would personally have a narrative detailing the property (something a buyer\u2019s broker may cut and paste for their client) as well as a narrative detailing the property\u2019s market/sub-market (again something that someone can cut and paste). We try to make the buyer\u2019s broker\u2019s (asset managers, RE development head, etc) job as easy as possible so they can get people excited about our listing with minimal work on their part.", "replies": [{"id": "edta1u1", "text": "The copy/paste-ability and making it easier for the buyer's team makes sense. Thanks for the response.", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}, {"id": "edtglns", "text": "Thank you for that great response!", "replies": [{"id": "eduus52", "text": "You bet! Schedule was rough today and I knew answering this in detail would get me in the right mood to conquer!!", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "edub3r0", "text": "I am a graphic designer and offer custom OMs starting at $175 for 10 pages. DM me for a link to my portfolio :) ", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "ee29icb", "text": "Regardless of what is in your OM (I dont even read most OM's as it has a lot of fluff), what is by far the most important is having an rent roll, operating history/cash flow statements or at the very least T-12 and your proforma. The most important thing is that these three should be in EXCEL, please no pdf. If you send me these 3 in excel, the quicker I will be able to assess the quality of the deal. ", "replies": [{"id": "ee2j55e", "text": "Sending it as a Vector PDF with a table, you can highlight/copy/paste in one go and the formatting won't get messed up. That's fine too, but only if you actually structure it properly in an invisible table. ", "replies": [{"id": "ee2wd95", "text": "Yeah but that still requires more work though when I could just get it in excel, and I get scanned copies of operating statements so many times and even programs like Able2 Extract will not work 100% of the time when it is not in the right format. Giving it to me in excel will save me time and the quicker I can look at the deal the quicker I can provide feedback. ", "replies": [{"id": "ee30nuk", "text": "The whole point is an embedded table IS a spreadsheet embedded. \n\nI just texted myself. It took me 33 seconds to open Excel, highlight the spreadsheet in PDF, right click, copy, right click on Excel, and paste. \n\nNot long tbh. \n\nThis only works if you actually properly embed the document in the PDF, not just paste the values. Just text values will end up on one row if pasted. 90% of people do it wrong when making the PDF. \n\nPDF also allows a clean/easy print, and some corporate networks block all .xls files. (ours only accepts new xlsx files)", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}]