What number do you actually put at the top when you send a commercial deal out

The number that decides whether your buyer can close is debt service coverage at whatever terms they can actually get, and you don't know those terms, so you can't lead with it. But you can stop leading with anything that dies the moment their lender sizes the loan. If your cap rate only works at 65% loan to value and every quote in that market is coming in lower, the deal is dead on line four regardless of how you opened.

Worth asking two of your buyers straight out what coverage and proceeds they're being quoted right now, and confirming any specifics in writing with the lender rather than repeating what a buyer told you in a phone call.

In-place NOI, and show me the rent roll on the same page. Every time someone opens with a cap rate I have to spend twenty minutes finding out which fantasy it was built on. If you tell me trailing twelve income, actual collected, and current occupancy, I'll compute my own cap in ten seconds and I'll trust it because I did it. Pro forma anything in line one and I assume the rest of the email is decorated too.

@quarry is describing the right instinct. A cap rate isn't information, it's the output of a division you did with assumptions I can't see. Price and income are inputs. Send me inputs.

What you send should be one screen: address or at least submarket, unit or tenant count, in-place gross collected over the last twelve months, the actual expense lines you have documentation for, and your contract price. Say plainly which expenses are estimated and which came from the seller's statements. If four units are vacant, say four units are vacant in the first two lines, because I will find out and then I will discount everything else you told me.

@flint the thing to understand about the two replies you got asking whether the cap was current or projected is that they weren't stalling you, they were doing the first minute of underwriting and you'd given them a number that couldn't survive it. Where price per unit is genuinely useful is as a sanity check against what's traded nearby, and in roughly a dozen states sale prices aren't public at all, so that check may be unavailable to you and available to your buyer. Don't lead with a comparison your buyer can verify better than you can.