Attention CRE underwriting teams:
If you or a colleague has been impacted by outdated systems, scattered data, and painfully slow underwriting workflows, you may be entitled to reclaim hours of your day… sound familiar? While this blog isn’t speaking about a class action, as you may have remembered hearing this message as a commercial back in the day, it’s more so a push to reclaim the time and focus that commercial real estate underwriting teams are silently robbed of every day. How can teams shift from managing a portfolio to growing the portfolio?
Through connected workflows and automation. CRE lenders are implementing AI and automation to help eliminate the invisible hours lost to manual tasks. That means turning rework and data hunting into actual deal-moving activity.
Now, we're not just talking about spreadsheets or emails—we're talking about inefficient processes that slow decisions and increase risk. Some may call it the silent P&L leak. Whatever your company or board members call it, it’s time we addressed it. We’ll break down where those hours really go, backed by good old data, as well as unpack the hidden costs they create. Don’t you think it’s time to fix disconnected workflows rather than sending them to an offshore crew to work on, or worse, adding in more gated tools?
The most expensive inefficiencies in commercial real estate lending are often the ones that go untracked. They aren’t the missed deals you can point to or the line items on your budget — they’re the hours quietly slipping away each week, buried in rework, data hunting, and duplicated effort.
For all the talk about digital transformation, most lending teams are still running on a patchwork of manual and semi-manual workflows. Over half of decision-makers, 53%, admit their organizations still rely on paper-based workflows to manage or “automate” business processes — a number that jumps to 72% in large enterprise teams. Even more telling: 83% say they use electronic manual workflows like spreadsheets and email as their primary system.
On the surface, these tools feel familiar and flexible. But they don’t scale. They create multiple sources of truth, scatter key data across inboxes and attachments, and slow teams down when it matters most. The result is a constant scavenger hunt:
Source: Forrester
The visibility gap is just as damaging. Four in five (79%) respondents say teams in their organizations are siloed, limiting their ability to see the whole picture and understand what’s happening across the business. For lenders, that means the deal context is fragmented.
This is a problem we keep hearing. The unspoken problem is widespread and measurable. An IDC study revealed that data professionals lose 50% of their time every week — 30% searching for, governing, and preparing data, and another 20% duplicating work that’s already been done elsewhere (IDC, 2023). Across industries, more hours are spent finding existing information rather than using it to create new insights.
In the lending process, this means risk signals get buried in 70-page PDFs, borrower history lives in someone’s inbox, and key market comps are hidden behind logins no one has handy. The result?
This is the silent P&L leak: the uncounted cost of operational drag that drains time, slows deals, and limits a lender’s capacity to grow.
That’s why the teams moving faster aren’t just automating for automation’s sake. They’re replacing scattered, manual workflows with connected systems that create a single, trusted view of both deals and portfolios.
When every stage of the deal lifecycle is visible in one place, lenders can:
It’s not about working more hours or chasing speed for speed’s sake. It’s about removing the invisible drag so every hour your team spends is on what moves the business forward.
Disconnected workflows create hidden bottlenecks that silently bleed time from underwriting teams every week. Most of this time is invisible on a report, but when you stop and add it up, the pile is staggering to ignore:
Teams can spend 6 hours per deal manually extracting data from financial statements and rent rolls when that time could be reclaimed with automation. This silent operational drag isn’t just time lost, it’s a strategic opportunity missed. It slows down deals and consumes your team’s bandwidth.
Let’s do simple math to show how big this leak is:
A 10–15 hr/week loss per underwriter = 520–780 hrs/year.
If an underwriter’s fully loaded cost is $48/hr, that's $25K–$37K per person annually lost to inefficiency.
For a 10-underwriter team, this is $250K–$370K annually—a serious silent cost.
Reallocating just part of that time could drastically improve deal velocity and underwriting quality. What can your team do with those extra 10-15 hours?
This isn’t just unique to CRE, across sectors, teams are using AI to automate and offload routine tasks as well as accelerate document work.
When repetitive document work is automated and information surfaces in context, teams reclaim hours per day that compound into days per week—and those hours get reallocated to analysis, judgment, and client impact. CRE underwriting can do the same: offload extraction and formatting, and shift time to deal quality and risk detection.
The answer isn’t hiring more analysts or offshoring the work to speed up paperwork. It’s connecting the flow of work, so information moves seamlessly. No more hand-offs, scavenger hunts, or rework cycles. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
When the tools talk to each other, teams stop talking about where the file lives and instead start talking about whether the deal makes sense. Connected workflows restore confidence and provide a full picture that Excel alone cannot provide.
The hours lost to manual work and disconnected data don’t just affect efficiency, they compound into longer deal cycles, increased portfolio risk, or even slower decisions. Every week that the silent P&L leak goes unaddressed is another week where resources are spent managing processes instead of growing the book. The fastest-moving lenders aren’t simply adding automation—they’re building connected workflows that give their teams consistency from the first document review to the final credit decision.
Blooma was built to eliminate the operational drag that slows CRE lending. By combining AI-powered data extraction, portfolio intelligence, and seamless integrations, Blooma connects every stage of the deal lifecycle in one place. With Blooma, lenders can:
The result? Underwriters spend more time assessing deals, less time chasing data. Ready to talk to our team to explore how Blooma can help your team automate manual work? Contact us to learn more.