What is an offering memorandum in commercial real estate?

An offering memorandum (OM) is the marketing document a CRE broker prepares to offer a property for sale: it presents the property, the deal terms (asking price, cap rate, NOI), the tenancy, and the broker's opinion of value, usually as a designed PDF.

Is the data in an offering memorandum verified or true?

No. An OM is an advertisement - a broker's opinion of value the seller agreed to before publication. Its figures are assertions as of a date, not independently verified market truth. openOM records who asserted the data, that it is unaltered, and as of when; verified means provenance, not truth.

What is the difference between an offering memorandum and a broker opinion of value?

An offering memorandum is the full marketing package used to sell a property; the broker's opinion of value is the price/valuation view expressed within it. Every headline figure in an OM (price, cap rate, NOI) reflects that opinion.

How do you extract data from an offering memorandum PDF reliably?

Instead of re-parsing the PDF per consumer, openOM embeds a machine-readable, broker-asserted, hash-verified payload in the OM itself (and mirrors it as JSON-LD), so any tool or AI agent reads the same verified data deterministically.

What is an offering memorandum (OM)?

An offering memorandum (OM, sometimes "offering memo" or "deal book") is the marketing document a commercial real estate (CRE) broker prepares to offer a property for sale to prospective buyers. It presents the asset, the deal terms, the tenancy, and the broker's opinion of value - typically as a designed PDF of 10-40 pages.

What an offering memorandum contains

The property - address, asset type, building and lot size, year built.
The deal - asking price, capitalization (cap) rate, and net operating income (NOI).
The tenancy - tenant(s), lease type (e.g. NNN), term, and the rent schedule.
Broker context - location, market, and investment-highlight narrative.

Why OM data is an assertion, not a fact

An OM is an advertisement: a broker's opinion of value that the seller agreed to before publication. The NOI may be in-place or pro-forma; the cap rate follows from a chosen price. So every figure is an identified party's opinion as of a date - not independently verified market truth. Any system that consumes OM data honestly must record who asserted it, that it is unaltered, and as of when - and must never claim the opinion is true. Verified means provenance, not truth.

The problem: OM data is trapped in the PDF

Because the OM ships as a designed PDF, every downstream party - buyers, brokers, portals, lenders, and AI agents - re-extracts the same numbers by hand or with error-prone parsing. The work is repeated thousands of times and each copy can drift or be misread.

How openOM makes an offering memorandum machine-readable

openOM is an open (MIT) standard that embeds a machine-readable, broker-asserted, hash-verified data payload inside the OM PDF (via the same mechanism as Factur-X / PDF/A-3), and mirrors it as JSON-LD on the web. The data is extracted once at the source and consumed cheaply everywhere - with its provenance intact.

openOM vs. manual OM extraction

	Manual / AI re-extraction	openOM
Where extraction happens	Every consumer, every time	Once, at the source
Provenance	Lost - who asserted what is unknown	Recorded - assertedBy + assertedDate
Integrity	Unverifiable	Hash-verified (RFC 8785 + SHA-256)
AI reliability	Hallucination-prone re-parse	Deterministic read of a verified payload
Cost at scale	Repeated per document	Near-zero downstream

Next steps

Brokers: publish a verifiable OM →
Portals / consumers: read and trust openOM data →
AI builders: ground your agent in verified OM facts →
Verify one now: check an OM PDF in your browser →

openOM is published by Vervelio Labs. The engine is deterministic and inference-free; every payload is an assertion, never a fact.