Free Commercial Real Estate Due Diligence Checklist (Excel)

Five sections, one workbook

The Checklist sheet is organized around five due diligence categories - Title, Environmental, Financial, Physical, and Tenant - with a Section dropdown on every row so tasks stay consistently categorized as you add to the list.

It ships pre-filled with 15 starting tasks (three per section) covering the basics - title commitment review, Phase I ESA, financial request, structural inspection, lease abstract review - and you can add up to 80 tasks total.

Because every task lives in one workbook instead of a separate checklist per category, the summary below the table can roll up completion by section without you tallying anything by hand.

Due dates and an automatic overdue flag

Every task gets a Status (Not started, In progress, Complete, or Flagged) and a Due date - fields that Adventures in CRE's well-known due diligence checklist doesn't include at all, tracking only status with no dates.

A Flag column checks whether today's date has passed the due date on any task that isn't marked Complete, and marks it OVERDUE automatically - so nothing quietly slips past its deadline unnoticed.

A task marked Complete never shows OVERDUE, even past its due date, so the flag only draws attention to genuinely open, time-sensitive items.

% complete by section, not one blended number

The summary calculates % complete separately for Title, Environmental, Financial, Physical, and Tenant - so you can see 'Environmental 40% done, Legal 90% done' at a glance instead of one combined percentage that hides which area is actually behind.

Alongside the section percentages, the summary shows total tasks logged, tasks complete, and tasks flagged or overdue - the numbers a deal team actually checks in a status meeting.

Quick financial check: NOI and cap rate

The Financial Metrics sheet is a simple three-input calculator: enter annual revenue, annual operating expenses, and purchase price, and NOI (revenue minus expenses) and cap rate (NOI divided by price) calculate automatically.

It's meant as a quick sanity check alongside your task checklist, not a substitute for a full underwriting model - for that, see the Real Estate Development Pro Forma template.

Free and ungated, unlike the paid alternative

Adventures in CRE's checklist - the best-known real Excel competitor in this space - is a genuine 72-task file, but it's gated behind a pay-what-you-can email prompt before you can see the structure.

This checklist is free to download with no payment prompt, and adds due dates, an automatic overdue flag, per-section completion tracking, and a financial metrics tab that the paid alternative doesn't have.