‹ All case studies
Case studies
/
Real estate lending
A new intelligence layer for real estate credit
A real estate lender uses Smart Bricks to analyse opportunities, interrogate downside risk and standardise credit decisions across an expanding portfolio.
Smart Bricks

Contents
Problem
Credit is a business of understanding what can go wrong. Real estate lending asks a different question of an asset: not only whether it can earn an attractive return, but whether the borrower can service the debt, how the collateral holds up under stress and how capital is protected when assumptions change. The lender needed that depth on every opportunity as its lending grew.
Situation
For the lender, each opportunity meant reading borrower information, valuations, financing structures, market conditions and legal terms together, and keeping that depth was getting harder.
Resolution
Smart Bricks puts specialised credit and asset agents on every opportunity. They analyse the underlying real estate, test the borrower’s assumptions, assess debt service capacity and run downside scenarios, all against the lender’s own credit policies and models. Every piece of evidence stays linked to its source, material assumptions are challenged, exceptions surface on their own, and the output feeds the lender’s existing credit templates.
The first page of the credit memo the agents draft
Cullum Yard, London
Credit memo for a £78m senior loan. Grade A office, City of London, 92,000 sq ft.
Credit underwriting
Within your risk limits
A £78m senior loan at 57.4% loan-to-value, 1.67x DSCR and a 10.0% debt yield. Every covenant holds in the downside case.
- Loan amount
- £78mSenior, 5 years, interest only
- Loan-to-value
- 57.4%Within limits: 60% maximum
- DSCR
- 1.67xWithin limits: 1.40x minimum
- Debt yield
- 10.0%Within limits: 9.0% minimum
- Borrower
- Checked
- Downside scenario
- Passed
Platform view, sample data.
Impact
Credit decisions need speed, but never at the expense of discipline. Smart Bricks gives the lending team a common intelligence layer through which every opportunity is judged the same way. The agents gather, structure and interrogate the information; people keep control of the credit decision. The result is a lending business that can scale its institutional judgement alongside its capital.
About Smart Bricks
Smart Bricks is an applied AI lab building the intelligence layer for real estate. Operating globally across Dubai, London and San Francisco, it pairs proprietary AI infrastructure with capital-markets expertise, so every investment decision is underwritten on live data and can be traced to its sources. Smart Bricks is an a16z speedrun company.

