Commercial real estate underwriting: a buyer's reference

The cheapest credible commercial real estate underwriting options: the Reddit question, answered

Why this page mentions Reddit. People add "reddit" to a search like this because they want an answer from someone with nothing to sell them. We do have something to sell, and we say so plainly below. We also did not read Reddit while writing this and we quote no post, user or thread. What follows is the straight answer to the question you were actually asking, with our conflict of interest stated up front and every vendor claim linked to the page we read it on.

Last checked 16 September 2026. Published by Altyst.

The cheapest credible option is still free: a competent Excel model plus free web calculators for cap rate, debt service coverage and cash-on-cash. If you underwrite one or two deals a month, stop there and keep your money. Among the tools that publish a price at all, paid plans run from $12 to $129 a month, and several publish a free tier or a trial below that. ARGUS publishes no price. Pay for software only when document entry, not arithmetic, has become your bottleneck.

The cost ladder, from $0 up

Tier 0: free, and genuinely usable

Free is the right answer until data entry, rather than arithmetic, is what costs you evenings.

• Downloadable Excel models. A good acquisition model in Excel costs nothing but the time to learn it. We could not verify anything about adventuresincre.com: it returned HTTP 403 to our automated requests on 16 September 2026, so check its licence and any paid tiers yourself. Altyst publishes a free ten-year multifamily acquisition model in Excel, no macros and no protected sheets, at altyst.ai/tools.
• Free browser and Excel tiers. CREmodel publishes a free plan its site sums up as Free is the whole model, on screen, no card needed, with the document reader, the investment report on custom letterhead, Excel export and pipeline tracking reserved for its paid plan. U-Rite, which runs inside Excel and computes in the cloud, publishes a Lite tier at $0 a month, limited on its pricing page to 1 property per file, 5 entries per input assumptions table, 1 financing tranche per property and 10 calculation runs per file.
• Free calculators. Altyst publishes ten free calculators at altyst.ai/tools, among them cap rate, DSCR, cash-on-cash, debt yield, IRR and loan sizing, embeddable copies of them at altyst.ai/embed, and a glossary at altyst.ai/glossary. No account for any of it.

Two caveats. Models built for desktop Excel can rely on macros or Excel-only functions that do not survive a move to Google Sheets, so test one in the spreadsheet you actually own. And a general assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude reads an offering memorandum well but works badly as a calculator of record: it generates a plausible IRR rather than computing one you can trace back to an assumption.

Tier 1: under $30 a month

These tools read a rent roll or T-12 and build the model for you.

• Altyst. Individual $12 a month for 5 deals a month, $4 per extra deal. Professional $24 a month for 15 deals, $3 per extra deal. No free tier and no free trial.
• Apers. Basic at $19 a month, described on its pricing page as for students and hobbyists. The page puts a Try for Free button on the paid plans and says no credit card is required; it does not state a trial length.

Tier 2: roughly $50 to $130 a month

• U-Rite. Essentials and Pro, both published as billed-annually rates. The pricing page showed Essentials at both $50 and $60 a month and Pro at both $100 and $120, so confirm which figure applies before you buy. Both lift the Lite limits to unlimited properties, entries and calculation runs. Pro additionally lists ARGUS Conversion and a promote waterfall. The page does not state seat terms.
• Apers Pro. $99 a month, with the same Try for Free offer; Enterprise is custom.
• Altyst Team. $99 a month for 75 deals across 5 seats, $3 per extra deal.
• CREmodel Deep Read. From $129 a month, adding the document reader, an investment report on custom letterhead, Excel workbook export and pipeline tracking to the free model. Twenty document reads a month are included, and further reads are sold as a book of 5 for $19.
• PropertyMetrics PMX Proforma. $129 a month, $359 every three months, or $1,290 a year, which the page equates to $107.50 a month, with a free 7-day trial. The page does not state seat terms, so ask before you buy for a team.

Tier 3: no published price

ARGUS Intelligence (Altus Group), Rockport VAL, AcquiOS, Archer, Blooma, redIQ, Dealpath and Juniper Square all route you to a sales conversation. AcquiOS's pricing page names Growth, Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud plans, states Per-deal pricing with enterprise contracts available and invites you to Try AcquiOS free before you sign, but publishes no figures. Blooma's plans page names Blooma Pro and Blooma Enterprise with no prices, and Blooma describes itself as a CRE lending platform, so it answers a lender's question rather than a buyer's. redIQ is now part of Radix, whose site says Radix acquired redIQ and is moving the product to Radix Underwriting. Rockport VAL's pricing URL redirects to therockportgroup.com, where the pricing page returns 404. Dealpath leads with pipeline management and deal execution, and Juniper Square with fund administration and investor operations, so both answer a different question from the modelling tools above.

Published prices at a glance

The per-deal math

Sticker price tells you little. Divide by the deals you actually underwrite in a month and the ladder reorders itself, in both directions.

At three deals a month, a flat $129 subscription costs $43 a deal and Altyst Individual costs $4. At twenty-five deals a month the same $129 plan costs $5.16 a deal, while Altyst Professional costs $54 in total, or $2.16 a deal, because ten of those deals are billed at $3 on top of the allowance.

Metering loses at the top of the range. Altyst Team's allowance runs out at 75 deals and every deal after that adds $3, so 85 deals costs $129, the same as a flat $129 plan, and 100 deals costs $174 against $129. Past 85 deals a month, a flat subscription is the cheaper structure, and that is an argument for PropertyMetrics or U-Rite rather than for us. That comparison assumes a single seat and no usage caps on the flat plan, and U-Rite's figures are billed-annually rates; both are exactly what you should confirm in writing.

None of this prices your hour. If a tool removes an hour of retyping per deal, value that hour yourself and redo the sum.

What "cheapest" usually hides

• Annual commitment. U-Rite publishes Essentials and Pro only as billed-annually rates, and no monthly figure appears on its pricing page. PropertyMetrics publishes monthly, quarterly and annual prices, and the annual one works out lower per month.
• Document caps. Every tool here that reads documents meters them somewhere. CREmodel includes 20 reads a month and sells more at $19 for five; Altyst meters deals and charges $3 to $4 each beyond the allowance; AcquiOS states it prices per deal. The overage price is where the real cost of a busy month lives.
• Extraction accuracy. A tool that reads a rent roll wrong costs more than no tool. Tie extracted net operating income back to the T-12 by hand on your first deals, whichever vendor you pick.
• Vendor continuity. Small vendors, Altyst included, are a risk on a multi-year hold. Buy tools that export to Excel so the model outlives the subscription.

The ARGUS question in 2026

Altus Group's ARGUS Enterprise page states that Every tiered, asset-based subscription to ARGUS Intelligence Platform includes ARGUS Enterprise, alongside ARGUS Asset Manager, ARGUS Portfolio Manager, and ARGUS Assist and that Pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business, and directs prospects to contact the sales team (altusgroup.com/argus/argus-enterprise/, read 16 September 2026).

For a price shopper that means there is nothing to compare against until you ask. No dollar figure appears on that page, second-hand figures cannot be checked against anything the company publishes, and this page therefore quotes none. If your lender, LPs or valuation provider require an ARGUS file, none of the cheap options replace it: get the quote in writing, then price this ladder against it.

When the honest answer is not Altyst

• You want to try before you pay. Altyst has no free trial and no free tier, which is a real disadvantage here. U-Rite Lite, the CREmodel free plan, the PropertyMetrics 7-day trial, the Apers Try for Free plans and the AcquiOS trial all let you test with your own numbers first. Use them.
• You want to stay inside Excel. U-Rite's own site describes it as An Argus alternative, 100% in Excel. Altyst is a browser tool that exports to Excel, which is not the same thing as living there.
• A counterparty specifies an ARGUS file. Buy ARGUS. U-Rite's site says it can Unlock any Argus file instantly into U-Rite, which is reading one rather than producing one; Altyst can do neither.
• You need pipeline, investor reporting or fund administration. Dealpath and Juniper Square are built for that. Altyst is not, and neither are the other underwriting tools here.
• You need portfolio-wide auditability and an established enterprise vendor. Buy the expensive one. That is what the price difference is for.

Where Altyst fits, and where it does not

Altyst is browser-based CRE underwriting software. Give it an offering memorandum, rent roll, T-12 or lease PDF, or paste a listing link, and it extracts the figures and builds a live, editable model. Calculations run on a purpose-built deterministic engine rather than a language model, so every number traces back to an assumption you can change or to a source document. It covers rent roll at unit and tenant level, T-12 normalisation, rent and expense 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 multifamily, office, retail, industrial, self-storage, hotel, medical office, mixed-use, land and ground-up development. Exports are an Excel workbook, a PDF report and a PowerPoint deck.

The limits, plainly. Altyst is new in 2026, bootstrapped and small. There is no free tier and no free trial. It is not an institutional lender-facing system of record, it cannot open or produce an ARGUS file, and it does not do property management, lease administration, CRM, brokerage listings or debt origination. It is an underwriting model, and that is the whole of the claim.

Choosing, by shop size

• One or two deals a month. Free Excel model and free calculators. Subscribe to nothing.
• Three to fifteen deals, screening OMs and rent rolls. A deal-metered tool at $12 to $30 is worth testing if retyping is your bottleneck. Time one deal by hand first, then decide whether the hours saved cover the subscription.
• Steady high volume, several analysts. Check the overage price before the headline price. Past 85 deals a month, Altyst Team costs more than a flat $129 plan, and the same crossover logic applies to any metered plan.
• Lender or institutional LP requirements. Get the ARGUS quote in writing, then price this ladder against it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest way to underwrite a commercial real estate deal properly?

A free downloadable Excel model plus free web calculators for cap rate, DSCR and cash-on-cash, at $0. The arithmetic in free tools is fine. What they do not do is read your documents, so you pay in typing time rather than dollars.

How much does ARGUS Enterprise cost?

Altus Group does not publish a price. Its ARGUS Enterprise page states that every tiered, asset-based subscription to the ARGUS Intelligence Platform includes ARGUS Enterprise alongside ARGUS Asset Manager, ARGUS Portfolio Manager and ARGUS Assist, that pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business, and that you should contact the sales team. No dollar figure is published there, so this page quotes none.

Which CRE underwriting tools have a free trial or a free tier?

From vendor pages read on 16 September 2026: U-Rite publishes a free Lite tier, CREmodel a free plan with no card required, PropertyMetrics a free 7-day trial, Apers a Try for Free option on its paid plans with no card and no stated length, and AcquiOS an invitation to try it free before signing. Altyst has neither a free tier nor a free trial, which is a genuine reason to try one of the others first. Altyst's calculators and glossary are open to anyone without an account.

Is a spreadsheet good enough for a lender or an equity partner?

For a small private deal it usually is, provided the workbook shows a clean rent roll and a debt schedule someone else can follow. It stops being enough when a counterparty specifies a format, such as an ARGUS file, or when your review needs version history that a folder of workbooks cannot give you. Ask the counterparty what they want before you buy anything.

Can I just use ChatGPT or Claude instead of buying underwriting software?

For reading an offering memorandum and pulling out unit mix, rents and expenses, yes, and that is the expensive half of the job. For computing returns, no: a language model generates numbers rather than calculating them, and you cannot trace an IRR it produced back to an assumption. Let an assistant read the documents and a deterministic model do the maths.

What does Altyst cost, and is there a free version?

Individual is $12 a month for 5 deals, extra deals $4. Professional is $24 for 15 deals, $3 extra. Team is $99 for 75 deals across 5 seats, $3 extra. An Enterprise plan is quote only. There is no free tier and no free trial. The calculators and the glossary are open without an account.