How it works in a data room
Portfolio sellers, such as banks offloading loans or landlords selling property books, export one row per asset with fields like balance, interest rate, maturity, collateral, payment history and status. The tape is uploaded as a spreadsheet, often in several versions as fields are corrected, and sits beside folders holding the underlying contracts. Buyers sample rows and check them against the source documents, so good full-text search and consistent file naming by loan or asset ID save a great deal of time. Download rights on the tape itself are commonly allowed, since bidders need to load it into their own models.
Why it matters in a deal
The tape is the basis of the price. If the fields are inconsistent or do not match the files, bidders widen their discount or ask for repurchase rights. In a distressed sale, where the timetable is short, a clean tape can be the difference between several bids and none. Version control matters too: everyone needs to know which cut-off date a given file represents. The restructuring guide covers portfolio sales in more depth.
Example
A regional lender in Spain sells 1,800 non-performing small business loans. The first tape omits collateral valuations for a quarter of the rows, and two bidders flag it in the Q&A within a day. The seller issues a corrected tape with a new cut-off date, posts a short change log next to it, and asks bidders to confirm they are pricing on the second version. Final offers arrive within two weeks.