NOAL launches AI platform to reshape commercial real estate investing

Commercial real estate (CRE) has an efficiency problem. The top 10 multifamily acquirers spent a combined $15 billion on acquisitions in 2025, yet underwriting capacity at those same firms stayed flat. Analysts are spending full days evaluating deals that never close, and the AI tools they've adopted weren't built for them.

NOAL, an AI-native platform purpose-built for multifamily owners and operators, launched today out of Vessel's Venture Studio in Columbus to address that gap. The company was co-founded by Heath Ackley and Evan Ballmann, who bring more than 40 years of combined institutional real estate experience across JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Nationwide, and Berkadia.

The problem wasn't abstract to either of them.

"In CRE, 80-90% of analyzed deals never transact," Ackley, who serves as CEO, noted. "Analysts spend full days underwriting deals that go nowhere. We built NOAL because we lived through that pain. NOAL is what we wished we always had."

The platform guides teams through the full deal lifecycle, from initial document upload through asset management and exit, across four integrated workflows: Underwrite, Collaborate, Finance, and Deliver. Users can upload an offering memorandum, financial statement, or rent roll, and NOAL produces an auditable pro forma and investor-ready summary in minutes, anchored to market-driven rent and expense comps and integrated live lending data.

The result, according to Ackley, is a fundamentally different pace of work. Teams can evaluate a new opportunity in 10 to 15 minutes rather than two to four hours, enabling them to underwrite five to ten times more deals with the same staff.

What makes that possible, the founders argue, is that NOAL was built for CRE specifically rather than adapted from general-purpose AI. The platform layers submarket-level rent, expense, and sales comp data on top of large language models, then adds live lending market data so teams can solve for a purchase price that hits their target return profile.

"Today, general purpose LLMs aren't supplemented with rent, expense, and sales comp data at the sub market level," Ackley explained. "This additional insight allows you to fully evaluate a deal to make an investment decision."

Building for that level of specificity came with its own challenges. Every real estate deal is structured differently, and so is every firm's approach to underwriting and managing assets. The NOAL team spoke with dozens of firms during development to cover the range of operating models before arriving at a user experience designed to work across them.

The asset management side of the platform monitors properties, local market conditions, and broader financial market movements continuously, surfacing recommended actions rather than leaving teams to find the signal themselves.

NOAL is the second company to emerge from Vessel's Flagship Studio Fund, which launched in July 2025 and is designed to build one to two companies per year. Vessel co-founders Will Zell, Patrick Klein, Corey Myers, and Amit Rastogi are institutional co-founders on the project, joined by Cas Maxwell, Co-Founder of NOAL and CEO of AI Owl, whose engineering team built the platform.

"We identified a structural inefficiency in a market we knew well, found two operators who had lived the problem firsthand, and a technical partner whose engineering team could build it, and then built the company alongside them from the ground up," Klein added.

As for where Ackley wants to take it, the ambition extends well past underwriting. Within two to three years, he wants NOAL to be the operating partner the commercial real estate industry relies on across the full investment lifecycle, from evaluating new deals and collaborating with teams, to funding investments and managing external stakeholder communication.

NOAL is available now at noal.ai, with plans starting at $500 per month and pay-as-you-go pricing at $175 per deal.