How Real Estate Alpha Automated Acquisitions and Leasing, One Division at a Time
About Project
Real Estate Alpha buys and runs value-add apartments across Ohio, and its edge is speed. Columnline runs AI employees across its acquisitions, underwriting, screening, and leasing, so a new deal is underwritten in minutes and a new lead gets a call in under seven minutes.
About Real Estate Alpha
Real Estate Alpha buys C and C+ apartment properties, renovates them to B+ in under a year, and refinances. About 50 people, including 17 or 18 full-time virtual assistants, run six divisions in house, from acquisitions and leasing to construction.
Co-founder Justin Spillers puts it plainly: “our whole business model is how quickly can we reuse our capital as fast as possible.”
Every division ran on repeat work done by hand. Justin brought Columnline in during February 2026 with a simple plan: list the five jobs most worth taking off the team, work them on a weekly call, then move to the next division. Acquisitions took five weeks. Leasing came next.
- Company
- Real Estate Alpha (VSF Development and VSF Rentals), Minster, Ohio
- Industry
- Multifamily real estate, value-add owner-operator
- Size and scale
- $72M portfolio, 700+ apartments, about 50 people, six divisions run in house
- What Columnline runs
- Owner intelligence, deal-file underwriting, tenant screening, speed-to-lead tracking, call coaching, leasing and acquisitions knowledge bases
- Tools it works with
- AppFolio, EliseAI, OpenPhone, Slack, Google Sheets, GoHighLevel, county records, Ohio Secretary of State filings
Before
- Bought owner lists were 40 to 50 percent right; one LLC lookup took 20 minutes
- A VA re-typed every offering memo, T12, and rent roll
- A VA checked 7 to 11 court portals per applicant
- 18.1 minutes to reach a new lead
- A full-time VA built leasing metrics by hand
- 50 to 75 property questions a week waited in Slack
After
- 8,380 properties with owner addresses scored by how many sources agree
- Forward the deal, get a filled underwriting sheet in 2 to 4 minutes
- One pass returns a risk level and a recommendation
- 6.6 minutes, tracked by rep
- Leads, dials, and graded calls update on their own
- An 87-page knowledge base open to all 46 team members
The Problem
Owner Intelligence
Problem
The best sellers were the ones nobody could find
Real Estate Alpha buys direct from owners. That only works if you know who the owner is. Most small apartment buildings sit inside LLCs, with records spread across county sites that all work differently. One lookup could take a VA 20 minutes and still be wrong.
“You can buy lists from Crexi, CoStar, all those, but only like 40% of the data’s right. The other 60%, that’s where the gold is. Cause nobody else is calling or hammering those lists.”
Justin SpillersCo-Founder, Real Estate AlphaSolution
An owner database that shows how sure it is
Columnline mapped roughly 20,000 multifamily addresses in Ohio and narrowed them to the roughly 4,000 that fit the buy box. The AI employee reads LLC filings, county auditor records, and eviction data, then scores each owner by how many sources agree.
The database now covers 8,380 properties and 2,859 owners across 50 counties.
For top targets it goes deeper, with 60 owner profiles that score sellers on signals like years owned, loan maturity, and rent gap. Ryan Smith, VP of Acquisitions, called the work “massively helpful.”
Owner Intelligence agent
Traces each property past the LLC to a real owner and scores the contact before outreach starts.
The Problem
Deal Underwriting
Problem
Every deal was re-typed into the model
Brokers send a deal as a pile of attachments, each in its own format. A VA opened every file and keyed the numbers into the underwriting sheet. The team underwrites about 100 deals a month to buy two or three, so nearly all of that typing went into deals they passed on.
Solution
Forward the deal, get back an underwritten file
Now the team forwards the offering memo to one inbox. The AI employee sorts each document, pulls more than 50 fields, and fills gaps like last sale price and assessed value from public records. It builds the deal folder, fills the underwriting sheet, logs the deal, and replies with links, in 2 to 4 minutes.
Deal File agent
Reads the broker’s attachments and hands back a built deal folder with the underwriting sheet complete.
“He’s pulling all that data in and automatically funneling it into our underwriting spreadsheet and filling in all the T12 data, rent roll data, et cetera. And just standardizing it, which used to take one of my VAs hours to do. And now when we get a new deal, it’s underwritten in a couple minutes.”
Justin SpillersCo-Founder, Real Estate AlphaThe Problem
Leasing
Problem
Leasing needed speed, and every check was still manual
The leasing team works 100 to 150 new leads a day. Justin sees speed to lead as the biggest lever on conversion, yet nobody could see it by rep. Each applicant needed a check of up to 11 county court portals. In Justin’s words: “We have a full-time VA that does nothing but run applications now.”
Solution
Faster calls, one-pass screening, and coaching by name
Every new lead is now matched to its first outbound call and posted by rep. Speed to lead dropped from 18.1 minutes to 6.6. Scorecards ran on 42 seats and tracked 3,219 dials in one week. Calls are graded against the company’s own script, with 2,959 graded so far.
A knowledge base covering 13 properties lets a setter who has never seen a building answer where the laundry is.
Tenant Screening agent
Checks court records across 43 of 46 counties in one pass and writes back a risk level, a recommendation, and three questions for the leasing manager.
“It should be a great coaching tool, which so far it is.”
Harper McClungLeasing Manager, Real Estate AlphaCall Coaching agent
Grades every leasing call against the script so managers can coach each rep by name.
Results
6.6 minutes to reach a new lead, down from 18.1.
- 2 to 4 minutes to underwrite a new deal, at 10 to 30 deals a week.
- 6.6 minutes to reach a new lead, down from 18.1.
- 8,380 properties and 2,859 owners across 50 Ohio counties.
- About 300 hours of VA research replaced by 60 owner profiles built in one run.
- 43 of 46 county court systems checked automatically for every applicant.
Outcome
The outcome
Real Estate Alpha makes money by turning capital over fast. The same team now underwrites every deal in minutes instead of hours, reaches owners no one else can find, and calls leads nearly two-thirds sooner. The books are clear too: August reconciled to $1,059,825 in cash collected and $1,507,899 in revenue booked across 114 signed lease documents, checked two separate ways.
Justin’s own team can run what was built. On a reference call for a home builder weighing Columnline, he said: “Even let’s say Connor gets hit by a bus, we’d be able to run it and update and monitor it pretty easily from what I’ve seen, which is nice.” The builder moved forward the same day.
Next steps
What’s next
With two 300-unit deals in motion and about 40 hires planned, the playbook now lives in systems new people can use from day one. Leasing is focused on the seven-day move-in rate, and instant live tours are rolling out next, giving each leasing manager a five-minute window to claim one. On acquisitions, a weekly report tracks each deal’s underwriting against how the property actually performs.
Want deals underwritten in minutes and leads called in under seven minutes at your company? Book a call, and we will map the first five jobs worth taking off your team.