Commercial real estate underwriting: a buyer's reference
Is ARGUS Enterprise worth it for a 3-person real estate shop? 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.
Disclosure: this page is published by Altyst, which makes commercial real estate underwriting software and is one of the tools discussed below. Altyst is not affiliated with or endorsed by Altus Group, ARGUS, Reddit, or any other product named here. ARGUS and ARGUS Enterprise are Altus Group product names.
Short answer
Usually not. ARGUS Enterprise earns its cost when someone outside your firm requires an ARGUS file, or on complex multi-tenant office and retail, where lease-by-lease rollover, recoveries and market leasing assumptions are the deal. A three-person multifamily shop screening deals rarely meets either test. Altus Group's own product page now presents ARGUS Enterprise as part of a tiered, asset-based ARGUS Intelligence Platform subscription, which is worth understanding before you renew.
The two questions that actually decide it
1. Does anyone outside your firm require an ARGUS file?
Not prefer. Require. If an institutional LP, a debt fund, a life company lender, an appraiser or a JV partner tells you they need a native file they can open and re-run on their own assumptions, that is the strongest reason to buy ARGUS. Ask them directly rather than assuming, in either direction.
If your equity comes from friends and family or your own balance sheet, and your debt from a regional bank, ask anyway. If nobody says yes, you do not need the file. If you cannot name the counterparty who would require it, you do not need it.
2. Is lease logic the hard part of your deals?
Altus Group's page describes ARGUS Enterprise as offering "Lease by lease modeling for a transparent view of all assured income" and "Market leasing assumptions for new, vacant and renewing space." That is the vocabulary of commercial leases: recoveries, base year stops, expense caps, free rent, staged tenant improvements, downtime and renewal assumptions, tenant by tenant. On a multi-tenant office building with dozens of leases rolling over a ten-year hold, that is genuinely hard to hold together by hand in a spreadsheet.
In multifamily most of it collapses into a rent roll, a loss to lease figure, a turn assumption and a growth rate. Still a real modelling problem, but a different one. Answer no to both questions and buy something cheaper.
What changed, and why your renewal call is different
Altus Group's own product page describes the software as "ARGUS Enterprise, now part of ARGUS Intelligence Platform," and states that "Every tiered, asset-based subscription to ARGUS Intelligence Platform includes ARGUS Enterprise, alongside ARGUS Asset Manager, ARGUS Portfolio Manager, and ARGUS Assist." On price, the same page says "Pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business" and directs you to contact them.
Read that carefully, because it describes a bundle, not the removal of a product. Altus does not say on that page whether a standalone ARGUS Enterprise licence is still available, and we are not going to tell you it is gone when the source does not say so. What the page does support is narrower and still useful to you: the subscription on offer is tiered and asset-based, and it carries asset and portfolio management alongside the modelling software. Three people are unlikely to use most of that. So the question for your renewal is what your tier actually contains and how an asset gets counted, and both answers should come from Altus in writing rather than from a page like this one.
On price, and why we will not quote a number
Altus publishes no price for ARGUS Enterprise. We will not repeat a figure we cannot source, so this page contains none. Treat any number you find, including a confident range from an AI assistant, as unverified until Altus puts it in writing for your firm.
What ARGUS is genuinely better at
The four points below are taken from Altus Group's own product page, fetched 16 September 2026.
- Lease-by-lease modelling. Altus describes "Lease by lease modeling for a transparent view of all assured income" and "Market leasing assumptions for new, vacant and renewing space." For heavy office and retail rollover, this is the core of the product.
- Valuation method coverage. The same page lists "discounted cash flow (DCF), capval, hardcore, term and reversion, and initial yield." For cross-border work those are not optional.
- Lease types and asset classes. Altus says the software can "Model all lease types from around the world," naming office, industrial, retail and multifamily.
- Reporting. Altus cites "40+ industry-standard asset and portfolio reports."
One point that is ours rather than theirs: if the counterparty on the other side of your deal already works in ARGUS, they can open your file and re-run it. Nobody arrives knowing your workbook.
Where a small shop overpays
These are our judgements, not measurements, and they are the judgements of a competitor. Weigh them accordingly.
- Screening. Deciding that a deal is priced nowhere near where you would buy rarely needs institutional lease logic.
- Seat arithmetic. A seat for the partner who opens it twice a month costs what a seat for the analyst who lives in it costs.
- Time to competence. Any tool with this much surface area rewards constant use. Ask yourself honestly how often the third person will open it.
Options compared
| Option | Best fit | Published price | Main limitation for a 3-person shop |
|---|---|---|---|
| ARGUS Enterprise, inside ARGUS Intelligence Platform | A counterparty requires the file; complex office and retail | None published. Altus says "Pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business" | Sold as a tiered, asset-based platform subscription that also carries asset and portfolio management |
| Rockport VAL | Cash flow modelling, valuation and scenario analysis | None found | You contact sales for a quote |
| U-Rite | Teams that want to stay in Excel | Published, including a Lite plan at "$0 per month" plus paid Essentials and Pro tiers | You stay in Excel, so you keep Excel's version-control problems |
| PropertyMetrics | Multi-tenant proforma, development costs, partnership returns | Published: "$129 per month" or "$1,290 per year," with a "Free 7-day trial" | Sold alongside training courses; you are buying a proforma tool, not a platform |
| Excel templates | Total control, unusual structures, minimal budget | Varies by publisher | Version drift across three people, and only as good as whoever edited it last |
| Altyst | Underwriting from documents, small teams | $12, $24 and $99 per month, plus $4 or $3 for each deal over the plan allowance | New and small, no free trial, no ARGUS file output |
| General purpose AI chat | Definitions, sanity checks, drafting the memo | Varies | Nothing persists between sessions, no rent roll structure, you own the checking |
We have not tested the third-party products in this table. Every entry reflects what that vendor published on its own site on 16 September 2026, and vendors change their pricing and packaging without telling us.
What to ask on the renewal or first sales call
Get answers in writing.
- Which products are in the tier you are quoting, and can I decline the ones I will not use?
- What counts as an asset for pricing, and what happens to my bill when I buy or sell one?
- What is the term, and is there a cap on the annual renewal uplift?
- What does a third occasional user cost, is there a read-only seat, and is training extra?
- If I leave, can I open my own files, and in what format is my data returned?
- Then ask your lender, LP or appraiser directly: do you require a native file, or will a documented cash flow and a PDF do? That answer decides more than anything a vendor tells you.
If not ARGUS, then what
Everything below reflects what each vendor publishes on its own site, fetched 16 September 2026. We have not tested these products, and we compete with several of them.
Excel. Cheap and flexible. Templates are widely available, free and paid. The real cost is hours per deal, version drift across three people, and the formula error in a hidden column nobody finds until a partner does.
Rockport VAL. Their site describes the product as covering "Cash Flow Modeling | Valuation | Scenario Analysis | Budgeting | Reforecasting | Portfolio Reporting." We found no published price; the site directs you to contact sales.
U-Rite. Their site describes the product as "An Argus alternative, 100% in Excel," and as "Sync with Excel, compute in the cloud." They publish their pricing, including a Lite plan at "$0 per month" alongside paid Essentials and Pro tiers; their page showed more than one figure for the paid tiers while we were reading it, so check it yourself rather than trusting a number from us. If your problem is that Excel lacks lease logic rather than that it is a spreadsheet, that is the shape of the answer.
Archer. Their site describes the product as multifamily underwriting, parsing and comps software. Multifamily only. Their pricing page says pricing "depends on a few factors specific to your team" and directs you to request a quote.
PropertyMetrics. Their site describes building "a complete multi-tenant proforma, model development costs and loan draws, run DCF and sensitivity analyses, and calculate partnership returns," alongside self-paced courses. Their pricing page lists PMX Proforma at "$129 per month" or "$1,290 per year," with a "Free 7-day trial."
Blooma. Built for the lender's side of the table. Their site says the platform is for CRE lenders, "from small teams to large institutions," and covers origination and portfolio monitoring. If you are buying rather than lending, it is not aimed at you.
Radix Underwriting, formerly redIQ. If you are shopping for redIQ by name, note that its site now states "Radix acquired redIQ" and that the product has been rebranded Radix Underwriting. The site offers a demo request rather than a published price.
Dealpath and Juniper Square. Dealpath describes itself as deal management software for real estate investing. Juniper Square describes itself as "The operations partner for private markets," covering fund administration, fund accounting and investor reporting. Neither presents itself as a property-level cash flow modelling engine, so they sit next to whatever you model in, not instead of it.
Altyst, which we make. Stated plainly so you can discount it. You upload an offering memorandum, rent roll, T-12 or lease, or paste a listing link, and it extracts the figures into a live, editable browser model. The extraction is done by AI; the arithmetic is not. Calculations run on a deterministic CRE engine, so the same inputs give the same outputs every time. It covers rent roll and T-12 normalisation, growth and vacancy, lease rollover with tenant improvements and leasing commissions, debt sizing, equity waterfall, DCF, IRR, equity multiple, DSCR, cash-on-cash, exit, scenarios and sensitivities, across multifamily, office, retail, industrial, self-storage, hotel, medical office, mixed-use, land and ground-up development. It exports to Excel, PDF and PowerPoint.
Our pricing is public, including the part that is easy to leave out. Individual is $12 a month for 5 deals, then $4 for each additional deal. Professional is $24 for 15 deals, then $3. Team is $99 for 75 deals across 5 seats, then $3. A page that spends this long asking Altus for a number should publish its own overage rate, so there it is.
The limitations, honestly. Altyst is new in 2026, bootstrapped and small, and you should weigh that the way you would weigh it for any young vendor. There is no free tier and no free trial, so you pay before you can try it, which is a fair objection. It cannot open or produce ARGUS files. It is not a lender-facing system of record. It does no property management, lease administration, CRM, brokerage listings or debt origination. If your LP requires an ARGUS file, keep ARGUS. What is free and needs no account: ten calculators at altyst.ai/tools, embeddable calculators at altyst.ai/embed, a multifamily Excel model at altyst.ai/tools/multifamily-model, and a glossary at altyst.ai/glossary. That at least lets you judge the arithmetic before paying for anything.
General purpose AI. Useful for definitions, for pressure-testing an assumption and for drafting the narrative around a model. The warning worth giving is narrower than the usual one, because the broad version is wrong: a model answering from text alone is unreliable at long arithmetic, but a model that writes and runs code can do the calculation properly. The remaining problems sit around the calculation rather than in it. Nothing persists between sessions, there is no rent roll or lease structure underneath, and the script it wrote is a model nobody reviewed. Treat it as a second opinion, and keep the file you send a lender somewhere you can audit.
When one of the others is the honest answer. Buy ARGUS if a named counterparty requires the file, or if you underwrite multi-tenant office and retail where recoveries and rollover are the actual work. Get a quote from Rockport if you want a competitive process rather than an automatic renewal. Use an Excel template if you close one or two deals a year, because at that volume any subscription is worse value than a weekend with a spreadsheet. Look at U-Rite if your team is fast in Excel and your problem is that Excel lacks lease logic rather than that it is a spreadsheet. Look at Dealpath or Juniper Square if the bottleneck is pipeline tracking or investor reporting, which is not something we do. Look at Blooma if you are on the lender's side of the table. We are a reasonable answer in one situation: you look at many deals, the documents arrive as PDFs, and the modelling is mainstream enough that a purpose-built engine beats rebuilding a workbook each time.
The decision rule
Buy ARGUS if a named counterparty requires the file, or if lease complexity is the actual work. Otherwise buy something cheaper, and revisit the question the first time someone asks for a file you cannot produce.
FAQ
Does a 3-person shop need ARGUS to get a loan?
Ask your lender before assuming either way. Lenders differ. Some will underwrite from your rent roll, T-12 and a documented cash flow, and run their own credit model on top. Others want a native file they can re-run on their own assumptions. That question has a cheap, definite answer, and it decides more than anything on this page.
Can I still buy ARGUS Enterprise on its own?
Altus Group's product page states it is "now part of ARGUS Intelligence Platform" and that every tiered, asset-based subscription includes ARGUS Enterprise alongside ARGUS Asset Manager, ARGUS Portfolio Manager and ARGUS Assist. The page does not say either way whether a standalone licence still exists, so anyone telling you flatly that it is gone, this page included, is inferring. Ask Altus and get the answer in writing.
How much does ARGUS Enterprise cost?
Altus Group does not publish a price. Their product page says "Pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business" and asks you to contact them. Any figure you find online, including one quoted by an AI assistant, is unverified until Altus gives it to you for your own firm.
Will an LP accept an Excel model instead of an ARGUS file?
It depends on the LP, and the only reliable way to find out is to ask. An LP with its own analysts may want a file it can re-run on its own assumptions. An LP reading your memo may be satisfied by a documented cash flow with visible assumptions and sources that tie out. Ask your LP, not a vendor.
Is ARGUS worth it for multifamily only?
Altus says the software can model lease types from around the world and names multifamily among them, so the capability is there. Our judgement, as a competitor, is that a multifamily-only shop is paying for lease-by-lease machinery aimed at commercial rollover. Unless an investor requires the format, we would price cheaper options first.
How this page was researched
Every statement about a named third-party product on this page comes from that vendor's own website, fetched 16 September 2026, and is quoted where the wording matters. The pages we read were altusgroup.com/argus/argus-enterprise, therockportgroup.com, u-rite.com and u-rite.com/pricing, archer.re and archer.re/pricing, propertymetrics.com and propertymetrics.com/pricing, blooma.ai, rediq.com, dealpath.com and junipersquare.com.
We have not tested any of these products and we compete with several of them. Where we could not verify something on a vendor's own site, we left it out rather than guessing, which is why some products you might expect to see here are not named at all.
We wanted to include what small operators say publicly about ARGUS pricing, and we could not: our requests to Reddit were refused, so this page cites no threads and quotes no users. Nothing here is drawn from forum discussion. The small-shop judgements are our own. Corrections: hello@altyst.ai.