Why the Best CRE Teams Are Ditching InDesign for Offering Memorandum Software

If you've ever spent two weeks waiting for a designer to turn around a 40-page offering memorandum for a commercial real estate listing, you already understand the problem.

The offering memorandum — the glossy, data-dense document that introduces an investment property to potential buyers — remains one of the most important marketing tools in commercial real estate. A well-crafted OM can generate multiple competitive offers. A sloppy one can kill a deal before it starts.

But for an industry that moves billions of dollars in transactions every quarter, the process of actually creating an offering memorandum has been stuck in the past.

The Old Way: Expensive, Slow, and Fragile

Most brokerages still produce offering memorandums using some combination of Adobe InDesign, freelance graphic designers, and internal marketing departments. The typical workflow looks like this:

1. Broker gathers property data, financials, photos, and comps
2. Sends a brief to a designer or marketing team
3. Waits 5-10 business days for a first draft
4. Reviews, requests changes, waits again
5. Repeats until the OM is "good enough" to send

The result is a process that takes two to four weeks from listing to market — an eternity when capital markets are moving and competing brokers are pitching the same owners.

The cost adds up, too. Custom-designed OMs typically run $2,000 to $5,000 per document when factoring in designer time, stock photography, revisions, and printing. For a mid-size brokerage producing 30-50 OMs per year, that's a six-figure line item.

What Is Offering Memorandum Software?

A new category of offering memorandum software has emerged specifically to solve this bottleneck. These platforms let brokers build professional, branded OMs directly — without touching InDesign or waiting on a design queue.

The best offering memorandum software combines three things:

• Pre-built templates designed specifically for commercial real estate property types (multifamily, office, retail, industrial, hospitality)
• Automated data integration that pulls in financials, rent rolls, market data, and property photos
• Brand customization so every OM matches the brokerage's visual identity

The pitch is simple: what used to take weeks now takes hours, at a fraction of the cost, with results that look as good or better than custom design.

How Brokers Are Actually Using It

CREbuilder is one of the platforms leading this shift. Built specifically for commercial real estate professionals, CREbuilder lets brokers create offering memorandums, property flyers, and investment summaries from a browser — no design skills required.

The workflow is straightforward:

1. Select a template matched to the property type and deal structure
2. Input property details, upload photos, and add financial data
3. Customize branding, colors, and layout
4. Export a polished, print-ready PDF

Brokers report going from raw property data to a finished offering memorandum in under two hours — compared to the two-week industry average.

The platform supports the full range of commercial real estate offering memorandum formats: single-asset investment sales, portfolio offerings, development opportunity briefs, and net lease marketing packages.

Who Should Consider OM Software?

The offering memorandum software category is most relevant for:

• Investment sales brokers who produce multiple OMs per quarter and want to reduce turnaround time
• Small to mid-size brokerages without a dedicated in-house design team
• Owner-operators marketing their own properties for sale
• Capital markets teams that need to move quickly when market conditions shift

For larger brokerages with established marketing departments, OM software can still add value by freeing designers to focus on flagship listings while brokers self-serve on standard deals.

The Bottom Line

The commercial real estate industry is slowly embracing technology across every stage of the deal lifecycle — from prospecting and underwriting to due diligence and closing. The offering memorandum, long one of the most manually-produced deliverables in the business, is finally catching up.

For brokers who are still spending weeks and thousands of dollars on every OM, purpose-built tools like CREbuilder represent a meaningful competitive advantage: faster to market, lower cost per listing, and a more consistent brand presentation across every deal.

Learn more at www.CREbuilder.com.