Read net absorption without inventing the trend
Lesson 2 of 6 · Pick the market like a fund
1 · Learn the move · Fact-check list
Before you put a spec building on a site you intend to keep, you want to know whether the submarket is actually taking space. A quarterly market report tells you, but only in the figures it prints, and the model will reach past them: 'absorption is accelerating' from one quarter, a vacancy rate for a size band the report never broke out, a construction figure it remembered. A fact-check list stops that. Every metric carries the line of the report it came from, a quarter-over-quarter direction appears only where both quarters are pasted, and anything missing reads [NEEDS: ...]. The developer's version adds one more check: footnotes. A single large build-to-suit move-in can carry a whole quarter's absorption, and a report that says so in small print is telling you the speculative demand your building would chase is thinner than the headline. Read the footnotes into the list.
Read absorption and vacancy for this submarket from the two quarters of the report below. Every figure cites its page. A direction appears only where both quarters are pasted. Read every footnote and say what it does to the headline. Anything the report does not give reads [NEEDS: ...]. No forecast, no guess at a missing quarter. [report pages]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
You are deciding whether a 180,000 SF spec building belongs on a 27-acre site in the Brackwater industrial submarket of Varrow County. You pasted two quarters of a market report: net absorption Q1 2026 +310,000 SF and Q2 2026 +455,000 SF; vacancy Q1 7.4% and Q2 7.1%; under construction Q1 1,050,000 SF, Q2 not printed. A footnote on p. 6 says Q2 absorption 'includes one 260,000 SF build-to-suit occupancy.' The report gives no figures by building size. Write the prompt.
Write the prompt for this scenario as given, or swap in a real one from your own work. The score works the same either way.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.