:Harvey: in Practice: How Real Estate Teams Move Deals Forward

Real estate transactions require navigating dense documentation, fragmented data, and evolving deal terms, all while coordinating across multiple stakeholders and timelines. From early-stage structuring through diligence, negotiation, and closing, legal teams must balance speed with precision to keep deals on track.

Harvey supports real estate lawyers across the full lifecycle of a transaction: from shaping deal terms at the letter of intent (LOI) stage to reconciling leases during diligence and finalizing agreements at signing. By connecting lease data, purchase agreements, diligence materials, and precedent in a single platform, Harvey helps teams identify risks earlier, draft with greater precision, and keep documents aligned as the deal evolves.

Below are some representative ways real estate teams use Harvey to execute deals with confidence at each stage.

Stage 1: Initial Deal Preparations

Draft Letters of Intent

Letters of intent establish the commercial and legal foundation for a transaction, often shaping the trajectory of negotiations and execution. Harvey enables teams to identify relevant LOI precedents and generate structured drafts aligned with proposed deal terms — including, but not limited to, purchase price, assumed liabilities, closing conditions, and key timelines.

By using Vault to surface comparable transactions and the Harvey for Word Add-In to draft directly within familiar workflows, lawyers can move quickly from a blank page to a tailored, market-aligned LOI. Teams can also analyze how prior LOIs evolved through negotiation and incorporate those insights into revised drafts, ensuring early-stage documents reflect both client strategy and real-world market practice.

Stage 2: Due Diligence and Document Review

Red-Flag and Risk Identification

Real estate diligence often requires reviewing large volumes of documents, including but not limited to, leases, estoppel certificates, service agreements, and title materials. Harvey can quickly extract and structure key provisions like co-tenancy clauses, assignment restrictions, renewal rights, and use limitations across the full document set. By aggregating these insights, Harvey surfaces potential risks and inconsistencies that warrant further review, such as conflicting tenant rights or restrictive covenants. As a result, legal teams focus their attention on analyzing material issues rather than manually reviewing every document.

At GSK Stockmann, Harvey is embedded directly into the firm’s real estate due diligence workflows. By combining structured document review with custom Workflow agents, teams can systematically analyze large data rooms, flag risks across leases and supporting documents, and identify missing or inconsistent information early in the process.

This approach has transformed diligence from a manual, document-by-document exercise into a more structured and scalable workflow. Teams at GSK Stockmann are able to generate red-flag summaries in hours instead of days and reduce diligence review time by up to 75% in unstructured data rooms, while maintaining lawyer oversight.

Draft Due Diligence Reports

Turning diligence findings into clear, client-ready reports is often time-intensive and repetitive. Harvey streamlines this process by using extracted insights to draft diligence reports based on firm templates and prior work product. Teams can generate structured summaries of key risks, obligations, and open issues, organized by category or document type. Lawyers remain in control of analysis and conclusions, but can spend less time on initial drafting and formatting, enabling faster turnaround of high-quality reports.

Rent Roll Reconciliation

Validating rent roll accuracy is essential to confirming asset performance and underwriting assumptions. Harvey can compare lease abstracts and rent roll data against underlying lease agreements to identify discrepancies in rent amounts, expiration dates, renewal options, and tenant obligations.

These comparisons highlight mismatches that may affect valuation or require clarification, such as unrecorded concessions or inconsistent renewal terms. By reducing the need for manual cross-referencing, Harvey allows teams to focus on resolving issues rather than locating them.

Stage 3: Drafting and Negotiation

Identify Precedents

Finding relevant precedent can be time consuming, particularly across large or fragmented document repositories. Harvey enables teams to retrieve and summarize comparable agreements based on asset type, deal structure, jurisdiction, or other key attributes. By quickly surfacing relevant provisions and deal context, Harvey provides a strong foundation for drafting and negotiation.

Compare PSA to LOI

Ensuring that the Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA) reflects the agreed LOI terms is critical to avoiding downstream issues. With Harvey, teams can quickly compare the PSA against the LOI, identifying where terms have been added, omitted, or modified during the drafting process. By reducing manual comparison work, Harvey helps minimize the risk of inconsistencies and supports a more efficient path to agreement.

At Carrefour Spain, the legal team uses Harvey to accelerate real estate contract analysis and drafting as part of its broader legal operations. By integrating Harvey with internal systems, the team is able to review and prepare large volumes of real estate agreements more efficiently, reducing turnaround times and delivering faster, more consistent support to the business.

Revise PSA

Revising a PSA requires balancing precedent language, issues lists, and evolving client positions. Harvey supports this process by enabling lawyers to iterate on drafts with direct access to relevant precedent and deal context. Through the Harvey for Word Add-In, teams can incorporate feedback, refine provisions, and align documents with negotiated terms more efficiently. This reduces version management friction and helps ensure consistency across drafts as the agreement evolves.

Issues List Preparation

Preparing a clear and actionable issues list is essential for efficient negotiation and client communication. Harvey can rapidly generate draft issues lists from redlined agreements, identifying key changes, open points, and areas of disagreement. These lists can be organized by priority, topic, or counterparty position, helping teams align internally before engaging in negotiations.

Draft Responses to Counterparty Comments

Responding to opposing counsel requires synthesizing issues lists, client positions, and precedent language. Teams can use Harvey to generate initial response drafts grounded in the deal context, and then refine drafts to reflect negotiation strategy and tone. This helps ensure responses remain aligned with client objectives, accelerating negotiation cycles while maintaining a high level of precision.

Review and Draft Ancillary Agreements

Real estate transactions involve a wide range of ancillary documents, including deeds, bills of sale, assignment and assumption agreements, and tenant notices. Harvey supports the drafting and review of these materials by leveraging precedent and deal-specific inputs to generate tailored drafts. This helps ensure consistency across documents while reducing the time spent recreating standard provisions. Lawyers can focus on tailoring documents to the specific transaction, rather than starting from scratch.

Stage 4: Deal Management and Closing Preparations

Create Pre-Closing and Post-Closing Checklist

Coordinating the many deliverables in a real estate transaction often involves tracking obligations across multiple parties and timelines. With Harvey Workflow agents, teams can generate comprehensive pre-closing and post-closing checklists that capture each party’s responsibilities, organized by deadline, priority, and ownership.

These checklists provide a centralized view of outstanding items and can be updated as the deal progresses. This structured approach reduces execution risk, improves coordination, and helps ensure nothing is missed through closing and beyond.

Want to see how Harvey supports real estate teams at every stage of a transaction? Contact our team to learn more: