Laburnum Real Estate — Scale transaction volume without scaling capital risk
Structured Risk Infrastructure
For Lenders, Family Offices & Active Investors

Scale transaction volume.
Without scaling capital risk.

A structured 24-hour deal triage protocol — used by lenders, family offices, and real estate investors to clear pipeline at speed without taking on risk they didn't price for. Compress underwriting into a single working day. Get to a clean Kill, Cure, or Proceed verdict — and the structuring required to make either one stick.

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The Kill / Cure / Proceed Framework

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01 The Problem

The most expensive risks
are the ones you don't see.

You have the deals. You have the capital, the relationships, the pattern recognition built up across years in the market. What you don't have — and nobody at your level admits to — is infinite review bandwidth.

So you triage by feel. Memos get a glance. Your team gives you a thumbnail view. You move — because not moving is its own kind of loss — and most of the time your judgement is right.

But the deals that quietly destroy capital aren't the ones that looked obviously bad. They're the ones in your blind spots — the assumption you didn't pressure-test, the counterparty whose last three deals were all restructured, the covenant nobody noticed. Things you didn't see, not things you got wrong.

"Either you play too safe and pass on the deal you should have done — or you take risks you didn't price for, because nobody had time to look properly. Neither is the right answer."

The lenders, family offices, and investors who scale without blowing up aren't the ones with sharper instincts. They're the ones who run a structured triage process that operates independently of bandwidth, mood, or how convinced the sponsor sounded on the call.

02 Who This Is For

Built for three specific operators.

If you recognise yourself in one of these, the framework will be useful. If you don't, it likely won't — and we'd rather you know that before you read it.

Profile 01

The Growing Lender

You're scaling origination volume but reaching the limits of internal credit capacity. You need senior-level risk judgement on a consultancy basis — not another full-time hire, not another six months of recruitment, not a bigger committee.

Profile 02

The Family Office

You're funding real estate transactions across the capital stack — debt, mezz, equity, JV. Your capital is not the constraint; your judgement bandwidth is. You need outsourced underwriting at the speed of your decisions, not at the pace of a slow institutional process.

Profile 03

The Active Investor

You're investing in your own deals at volume. You want a trusted second read on each transaction before commitment — fast enough to keep the deal alive, sober enough to kill it if it should be killed, structured enough to defend the verdict to your IC.

03 The Framework

Every deal has three possible outcomes.

The job of a 24-hour risk screen is to tell you which one applies — with confidence, before the deal costs you more than the screen did.

i.
Outcome 01

Kill

A structural problem the deal cannot recover from. Capital stack broken, counterparty risk unacceptable, planning path untenable. Walk now, preserve relationship, move on. Walking away fast protects margin and reputation.

ii.
Outcome 02

Cure

The deal as presented is a kill — but restructured, it's a proceed. Renegotiated price, new covenants, shifted risk allocation, alternative financing path. The most valuable outcome — and the one most operators miss under time pressure.

iii.
Outcome 03

Proceed

Risk is understood, priced, and acceptable. Move with confidence and the full weight of your review behind you. Proceed decisions made on a framework defend better at IC than proceed decisions made on instinct.

04 Inside The Framework

What you'll have after reading it.

A complete, portable triage protocol you can apply to the next deal on your desk — before you finish the coffee.

  • i.

    The 24-Hour Triage Protocol

    The exact five-stage process used to move a deal from "inbox" to "decision" inside one working day — including which information must be gathered first and which can wait until after the verdict.

  • ii.

    Five Red Flags That Kill A Deal Immediately

    Pattern recognition from hundreds of reviewed transactions. The structural signals that mean walk, not negotiate — and why each one is non-negotiable regardless of headline return.

  • iii.

    Three Structural Changes That Turn A Kill Into A Cure

    The renegotiation levers most operators don't pull because they move too fast to see them — and the specific language to use when requesting each one from the other side.

  • iv.

    Case Study — A Pipeline Compressed To 18% Of Its Original Size

    How one client cut their active pipeline by more than four-fifths in a single week — walking away from the bottom of the stack and closing a higher proportion of the top.

  • v.

    The Decision Memo Template

    A one-page triage document you can populate for any deal in under 15 minutes. Your IC will read it faster. Your capital partners will take it more seriously.

◆ Reserved for Advisory Clients

The Application — Running The Framework On Your Live Pipeline

The framework is the method. Applying it at speed across live deals — with end-to-end underwriting, structuring, execution and monitoring on your full book — is the work we do under the 24-Hour Risk Screen engagement and the ongoing Advisory Retainer.

Richard, Laburnum Real Estate
Richard · Principal
05 The Author

Senior risk judgement, without the headcount.

Laburnum is built around a single observation: in real estate finance at scale, the bandwidth that decides which deals you do is also the bottleneck that limits how many deals you can do. Bandwidth becomes the asset.

The work is structured around two outcomes: don't lose capital on the deals you do, and don't miss the deals you should be doing. Both are failures. Both come from the same root cause — review capacity that doesn't scale with deal flow.

Twenty years of risk judgement, packaged as structured infrastructure — for the lenders, family offices, and active investors who need it without the cost of a full-time hire.

Richard, Laburnum Real Estate Principal · Structured Risk Infrastructure
06 The Result

What the framework looks like
applied at scale.

22 → 4
Pipeline Triaged
82%
Killed Or Cured
5 days
Full Screen Complete

One client brought us 22 deals under active consideration — the kind of pipeline that looks healthy until you realise the team is reviewing them at two hours each and making decisions on feel.

We triaged the full set in five working days. Fourteen were killed outright. Four were cured — restructured, repriced, or rebudgeted into something that actually worked. Four proceeded cleanly, with structured decision memos that the investment committee approved in a single session.

The client closed two of the four proceed deals over the following two months — instead of spending the same weeks spread across twenty-two transactions that would have mostly ended in nothing, or worse.

07 How It Works

Three steps to the first screen.

i.

Read The Framework

It's free, it takes under twenty minutes, and it gives you the method you can apply to any live deal immediately. No gate, no sales call required.

ii.

Book A Qualification Call

If the framework is useful and you want the application, book a 15-minute call. We'll walk through your pipeline and decide together whether a 24-hour risk screen makes sense.

iii.

Triage Your Next Deal

If we proceed, you'll have a structured Kill / Cure / Proceed verdict on your chosen transaction within 24 hours — with the reasoning memo to match.

08 Questions

The questions most people ask.

I already have an in-house team. Why would I add a consultant?
The framework works best as an independent second read, not a replacement. Most clients use Laburnum to provide senior risk judgement on a consultancy basis without the cost of another full-time hire — particularly useful for growing lenders scaling origination, and family offices spread thin across the capital stack. The role is bandwidth, not duplication.
Do you guarantee returns?
No. We don't promise returns — and frankly, anyone in this category who does should be avoided. What we promise is reduced risk and faster decisions. You'll know which deals to walk away from sooner. You'll restructure the ones that can be saved before you've over-committed. And you'll proceed with confidence on the ones worth doing.
We move fast. Can you really turn around a screen in 24 hours?
Yes. Twenty-four working hours from the moment we receive the deal pack. That's not a marketing number — it's the design constraint the entire framework is built around. Faster on simple transactions; slower only if the structure is genuinely unusual.
What kinds of transactions does this apply to?
Commercial real estate transactions of any size — acquisitions, developments, refinancings, lending decisions, equity investments. The framework is structural, not sector-specific. We've applied it across senior debt, mezzanine, JV equity, development financing, and asset-backed lending.
How does the engagement work?
We start with a single 24-hour deal screen as a trial — a fixed fee on one transaction, so you can see the work before committing further. Operators with consistent pipeline typically move to an ongoing engagement after that, where we handle underwriting, structuring, execution, and monitoring across the live book. Exact pricing discussed on the qualification call.
Will you tell me what I want to hear?
No. Our value to you is independence. If the deal is a kill, we say so in the memo. If the work isn't a fit, we tell you on the qualification call. You're not paying for agreement; you're paying for clarity.
Capacity Note

Three retainer slots remaining
before the 2026 cohort closes.

Each engagement is a working-day commitment per deal. We take on a small number of clients deliberately — when those slots are filled, the next intake opens once existing engagements stabilise.

09 Get The Framework

You don't need a new team.
You need a better filter.

The framework is free. It takes twenty minutes to read and will pay for itself the first time you use it to walk away from a deal you would otherwise have done.

Complimentary · PDF

The Kill / Cure / Proceed Framework

Delivered to your inbox immediately.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Read in under 20 minutes.