Commercial real estate underwriting: a buyer's reference

AcquiOS alternatives for CRE underwriting: the Reddit question, answered

Published 16 September 2026 by Altyst.

AcquiOS reads offering memorandums, T-12s and rent rolls and populates an Excel model in your own format, then scores the deal for investment committee. The alternatives worth looking at depend on the job: ARGUS Intelligence Platform for valuation and cash flow forecasting, Dealpath for pipeline and deal execution, Altyst for browser-based underwriting with a deterministic engine, or a spreadsheet you build once and reuse. Altyst wrote this page and sells underwriting software.

People add reddit to a search like this because they want an answer from someone with nothing riding on which tool you pick.

That is not us. Altyst publishes this page and sells commercial real estate underwriting software, so we do have something to sell you, and we are one of the options below.

We also did not read Reddit. We quote no post, no comment, no user and no vote count, and nothing here reports what anyone there said.

What we did instead: read the vendors' own pages and link every claim to the page we read it on. The sources list at the bottom is the whole list.

What AcquiOS says it does

From acquios.ai, read on 16 September 2026. The site describes a platform running "from the moment a deal hits your inbox to the moment you close." Broker emails can be forwarded in to create pipeline deals; the stated inputs are offering memorandums, T-12s and rent rolls.

The output claim is the one that matters here. AcquiOS says it populates your existing Excel template with the extracted assumptions and recalculates from there, promising "every output in your format." It also describes a 0 to 100 "AcquiScore" with a proceed or caution recommendation, IC decks in PowerPoint, checks of rent comps against market data, conflict of interest mapping and portfolio risk monitoring. Figures such as "save 92% of analysis time per deal" are their numbers, not measurements we ran.

Their pricing page names three plans, Growth, Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud, and refers to "per-deal pricing with enterprise contracts available." No dollar amounts were published on the date we read it.

Say it up front: the Excel template thing is a real advantage

If your firm underwrites in a house model that partners, lenders and the investment committee already trust, a tool that fills in that model solves a political problem as well as an arithmetic one. Nobody re-learns a layout, and nobody argues about whether the new tool's NOI means what the old one's meant.

Altyst does not do that. It builds its own model from the documents and exports to Excel, PDF and PowerPoint, but the layout is ours, not yours. If "it has to come back in our template" is a hard requirement, that points at AcquiOS, not at us. Altyst also cannot open or produce ARGUS files.

The alternatives, by what you actually want

Claims come from each vendor's own pages, read 16 September 2026 and linked below.
OptionBuilt forWorth a look whenNot the tool for
AcquiOS Extraction into your own Excel template, deal scoring, IC output The house model is non-negotiable Pricing you can check before a sales call
ARGUS Intelligence Platform (includes ARGUS Enterprise) Valuation and cash flow forecasting, sold as a tiered asset-based subscription Counterparties expect an ARGUS file A self-serve price. Altus asks you to contact them
Dealpath Pipeline and deal execution across a team The bottleneck is tracking deals, not modelling them Building the model itself. Its homepage describes comparing underwriting models
Altyst Browser underwriting from an OM, rent roll, T-12, lease or a pasted listing link You want a full editable model at a published price Filling in your existing template, or anything ARGUS-format
Your own spreadsheet Whatever you decide Deal volume is low, or you want to own every cell Typing a rent roll by hand every time

On ARGUS

Altus Group's page describes ARGUS Enterprise as commercial property valuation and cash flow forecasting software, "now available as part of ARGUS Intelligence Platform," and says "every tiered, asset-based subscription to ARGUS Intelligence Platform includes ARGUS Enterprise, alongside ARGUS Asset Manager, ARGUS Portfolio Manager, and ARGUS Assist." The page does not say either way whether ARGUS Enterprise can still be bought on its own, so we will not tell you that it cannot. Ask them.

On Dealpath

Dealpath calls itself "The AI-Powered Operating System for Real Estate Investing," centred on a pipeline where teams "maintain a shared, real-time view of every active deal across regions and stages" and can "compare underwriting models to see which deals pencil." Comparing models is a different job from building one. No pricing on the homepage we read.

On Altyst, stated plainly because this is our page

Altyst ingests an OM, rent roll, T-12, lease or a pasted listing link and builds an editable model: T-12 normalisation, growth, vacancy, lease rollover with tenant improvements and leasing commissions, debt sizing, equity waterfall, DCF, IRR, equity multiple, DSCR, cash-on-cash, exit assumptions, scenarios and sensitivity tables, across ten asset types including land and ground-up development.

The AI does extraction only. The arithmetic runs on a deterministic engine, so the same inputs give the same numbers and every figure traces to a source document or an assumption you can edit. Pricing is published: $12 a month for 5 deals, $24 for 15, $99 for 75 across 5 seats, extra deals billed per deal. No free tier, no free trial. No property management, lease administration, CRM, brokerage listings or debt origination.

Six checks that catch a wrong model, in any tool or none

This part is for you and your own spreadsheet. None of it requires buying anything.

  1. Rebuild gross potential rent from scratch. GPR is the total scheduled rent for every unit or suite at market or asking rent, vacant units included. It is not unit count times average in-place rent. A GPR built from occupied units only either drops the vacant space entirely or, once a vacancy factor comes off below it, counts the same loss twice.
  2. Look for stacked deductions. Vacancy, loss to lease, concessions and bad debt each come off GPR once. Loss to lease is the gap between market rent and in-place rent, so it belongs on a rent line built at market. Build the rent line from in-place rents instead and that gap is already inside the number, and subtracting it again clips income for every year of the hold.
  3. Fix the NOI boundary first. NOI excludes debt service. Treatment of replacement reserves varies, so decide whether yours is before or after reserves and check that any NOI you compare against uses the same convention. Two cap rates struck off different NOI conventions are not comparable, whichever one you prefer.
  4. Recompute the coverage ratios by hand. DSCR is NOI divided by annual debt service. Debt yield is NOI divided by the loan amount. Both inherit the NOI you just defined, so if yours is after reserves and the lender's is before, the two will not match even when both are right.
  5. Read the equity multiple next to the IRR. Equity multiple is total distributions divided by equity invested, and the two move together: a multiple at 1.0x is a zero IRR, and below 1.0x the IRR is negative no matter what the summary page says. So a strong IRR sitting next to a multiple barely above 1.0x is telling you that timing, not profit, is carrying the return, and that a short hold or an early refinance has to land on schedule.
  6. Nudge one input and watch. Move the exit cap 25 basis points and confirm proceeds, IRR and the multiple all move. If one of them sits still, a static value has been pasted where a formula belongs, and no amount of reading the output will show you that.

Run them against a deal you already know cold, giving every candidate the same documents. To check arithmetic without installing anything, Altyst keeps ten calculators free and ungated at altyst.ai/tools, plus a free ten-year multifamily model in Excel and a 55-term glossary.

Questions people actually ask

Is there a Reddit thread comparing AcquiOS alternatives?

We do not know, and this page is not a report of one. We did not read Reddit and quote nobody from it. Everything above comes from vendor pages we fetched ourselves and listed in the sources.

How much does AcquiOS cost?

Their pricing page names Growth, Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud plans and mentions "per-deal pricing with enterprise contracts available," but published no dollar amounts on the date we read it. You would need to contact them.

Can any of these replace ARGUS?

It depends on whether the ARGUS file itself is the deliverable. If a lender, appraiser or joint venture partner expects to receive one, nothing that cannot produce that file is a replacement, and Altyst cannot open or produce ARGUS files. If what you need is a defensible cash flow and a set of returns, other tools are in play.

Does it matter that AI is doing the underwriting?

Draw the line at extraction. A model is worth arguing with when the AI reads documents and a deterministic engine does the arithmetic, because then the same inputs give the same outputs every time and disagreements are about assumptions. Ask any vendor where the calculations run, and check the model by hand anyway.

What is the cheapest way to underwrite a deal properly?

Free calculators and a good template, checked by hand. That is not a sales answer, it is just true at low deal volume. Software earns its keep when the typing, not the thinking, is the bottleneck.

Why should anyone trust a comparison written by a competitor?

Do not trust it. Check it. Every third-party claim here links to the page it came from, and the concession is at the top: a tool that fills in your own Excel template does something Altyst does not do at all.

Sources

Fetched 16 September 2026. These are the only pages this article draws on for third-party claims. No Reddit content was read or used.