Why the County Record Beats the Pro-Forma

When a property is for sale, the seller usually hands buyers a polished package of numbers — projected income, projected expenses, projected profit. In the industry it is called a pro-forma. It is a useful starting point. It is also, fundamentally, a sales document, written by the person who wants the highest possible price.

There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you remember what it is. The mistake — and it is a common and expensive one — is to treat a seller's projection as fact. At Avanta, we treat it as a claim to be checked. Our rule is simple: verify everything against the public record, and when the two disagree, trust the record.

A real example

Not long ago we were studying a community whose offering package listed a certain figure for annual property taxes. It was a reasonable-looking number, and a less careful buyer would have typed it straight into their own analysis and moved on.

We did what we always do and pulled the actual figures from the county — public records that anyone can access but that surprisingly few buyers bother to confirm. The real tax picture was different from what the package claimed. Left uncorrected, that single line item would have quietly overstated the property's income for years and led us to overpay from day one.

We did not adjust our optimism to fit the seller's number. We adjusted our price to fit the truth. The gap between the claim and the record came straight off what we were willing to offer.

Why a single line matters so much

In real estate, a property's value is tied to its net income. Small, recurring errors in that income — a tax figure that is too low, an insurance cost that is understated, repair expenses that are quietly left out — do not stay small. They get multiplied into the price. An overstatement of a few thousand dollars a year can translate into tens of thousands of dollars of overpayment. Getting the boring line items exactly right is not busywork. It is one of the most valuable things we do.

What we verify

The tax example is just one of many. Before we advance a deal, we independently confirm the things a pro-forma tends to present optimistically:

• Taxes and insurance — from public and third-party sources, not the seller's estimate.
• Actual rents and occupancy — from the real rent roll and payment history, not projected “market” rents.
• Real operating costs — utilities, repairs, and management as they actually are, not as they might be in a perfect year.

The discipline is the point

This work is unglamorous and slow, and it frequently kills deals we would otherwise have liked. We consider that a feature, not a flaw. When we eventually bring an opportunity to our investors, it has survived this scrutiny — which means the numbers you see are ours, confirmed against the public record, not a seller's hopes copied onto our letterhead. In a business built on trust, we would rather earn it one verified line item at a time.