Commercial real estate underwriting: a buyer's reference
Multifamily underwriting software for small syndicators: 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, and Altyst is one of the five options compared below. Read our section with that in mind.
Altyst is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Reddit, Altus Group, Radix, redIQ, DealCheck, or Adventures in CRE. We receive no referral fees from any tool named here.
This is not a Reddit thread and it quotes no Reddit content. It is our own write-up of the question people ask there.
If you run 1 to 10 multifamily deals a year, no single tool covers the whole job. An Excel model you own is auditable and costs you data entry. redIQ, now moving to Radix Underwriting, ingests multifamily rent rolls and operating statements and publishes no price. DealCheck publishes its prices and has a $0 tier, and its published feature list stops short of a syndication waterfall. Altyst is ours: it turns those PDFs into an editable model, and it is new, small and has no trial. Altus Group presents ARGUS Enterprise as part of the ARGUS Intelligence Platform and publishes no price for it.
Every claim below about a company other than us was checked against that company's own live page on 16 September 2026, and is quoted or cited. Where we could not verify something, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Who this is for, and the workflow to survive
A general partner closing one to ten deals a year, usually 20 to 200 units, raising from a small LP list or a friends-and-family syndicate, with no analyst. Every tool is fine in a demo. The test is the real sequence:
- The broker sends an OM, rent roll and T-12, all PDFs, with an expense taxonomy matching none of your last three deals.
- You normalise the T-12: strip non-recurring items, fix the management fee, reserve for replacements at a number your lender accepts.
- You mark rents to market unit by unit, model rollover, size debt, build the waterfall, and get to IRR, equity multiple, DSCR and cash-on-cash.
- You produce something an LP can read in one sitting.
- Then it re-trades, or the lender comes back 40 basis points wider, and you redo all of it.
Step five is where tools fail. A fast first pass and an equally slow tenth has not helped you.
The five options
An Excel model you own
A spreadsheet has one advantage nothing else on this list has: you can open every formula. Hand the file to a lender and they can trace it. No vendor can sunset it, raise your seat price, or change a calculation under you between deals.
Where it breaks is data entry. A 120 unit rent roll typed by hand, then a T-12 mapped by hand, is a long sitting of clerical work before you have had one thought about the deal, and a pasted column that shifts a range makes the IRR confidently wrong. Version control is the second problem: the file that went to your lender and the file on your desktop drift apart quietly.
If you came here wanting a view on Adventures in CRE, we do not have one to give you. On 16 September 2026 adventuresincre.com returned HTTP 403 to our automated request, which blocks a script rather than a person. We could not read their pages the way we read the others, so we make no claim about their models, their terms or their cost. Check the site yourself in a browser.
redIQ, now moving to Radix Underwriting
redIQ's site, fetched 16 September 2026, states that "Radix acquired redIQ because we believe in what the platform can become", and carries the line "The final cutover to Radix Underwriting is coming soon". The product is described on that page as "An investment decision engine".
The same page describes ingesting rent rolls and operating statements, forecasting NOI, modelling revenue and expenses, building "min-max scenarios", stress-testing assumptions, repricing deal terms, and defining a renovation scope to project stabilised rents and expenses post-rehab. It is presented as multifamily-specific. If your problem is multifamily documents arriving in inconsistent formats, that is the problem it addresses.
Where it breaks for a small GP is buying it. The site publishes no price and the call to action is a demo request. A tool you cannot price on Tuesday night is one you cannot buy before Thursday's LOI. If you underwrite multifamily at volume, get a number from them before you look at anything cheaper, including us.
DealCheck
DealCheck publishes its prices. On dealcheck.io/pricing, checked 16 September 2026: a Starter tier at "$0", Plus at "$10/mo" and Pro at "$20/mo", with a "14 day trial" shown on the paid tiers and a yearly billing toggle marked "3 months free". We have not converted that into an annual figure, because the page does not print one. The calculators named on the site cover rentals, house flipping, wholesaling, and multi-family and commercial.
Where it breaks: the features listed against those plans are saved properties, property photos, sales and rental comps, property templates, investment potential insights, purchase criteria, a purchase offer calculator, property owner lookup and branded property reports. No equity waterfall, promote, GP and LP split, preferred return, investor hurdle or unit-level lease rollover appears anywhere in that published list. If you are syndicating, that is the ceiling you meet first.
Altyst
Ours, so weigh it accordingly. Altyst is browser-based CRE underwriting software. Give it an OM, rent roll, T-12 or lease PDF, or paste a listing link, and it extracts the figures and builds a live, editable model: unit and tenant level rent roll, T-12 normalisation, rent and expense growth, vacancy, lease rollover with TI and leasing commissions, debt sizing, equity waterfall, DCF, IRR, equity multiple, DSCR, cash-on-cash, exit assumptions, scenarios and sensitivity tables. It exports an Excel workbook, a PDF report and a PowerPoint deck, and covers multifamily, office, retail, industrial, self-storage, hotel, medical office, mixed-use, land and ground-up development. Pricing is public: $12 a month for 5 deals ($4 per extra), $24 for 15 deals ($3 per extra), $99 for 75 deals across 5 seats ($3 per extra).
Calculations are deterministic, run by a purpose-built CRE engine rather than generated by a language model, so every number traces back to an assumption or a source document. Extraction is the part a model assists with, which makes it the part you check line by line before anything goes to an LP.
Where it breaks, plainly. It is new in 2026, bootstrapped and small, so there is no long track record behind it and no large support organisation. There is no free tier and no free trial, a real barrier if trying before paying is how you buy software. It is not an institutional system of record and it writes no native ARGUS file. It does no property management, lease administration, CRM, brokerage listings or debt origination. One tool in a stack, not the stack.
ARGUS Enterprise, inside ARGUS Intelligence
Altus Group's ARGUS Enterprise page, fetched 16 September 2026, describes "Lease by lease modeling for a transparent view of all assured income" and "Market leasing assumptions for new, vacant and renewing space". It says the product can model "all lease types from around the world", naming office, industrial, retail and multifamily. It lists valuation by "Discounted Cash Flow (DCF)" alongside traditional capitalisation methods, naming "Hardcore Valuations, Term and Reversion, and Initial Yield", and "40+ industry-standard asset and portfolio reports". The page names its audience as "Real estate investors, asset managers, portfolio managers, research leaders and valuation professionals".
Read that list and ask how much of it you would use on one 60 unit deal with flat residential leases. It describes a valuation and asset management platform, and you would be buying the whole of it. If a counterparty in your deal requires a native ARGUS file, that settles the question and nothing on this page substitutes. If none of them has ever asked you for one, the list above is what you would be paying for.
What Altus Group's page says about ARGUS in 2026
Altus Group's product page, fetched 16 September 2026, states that ARGUS Enterprise is "now part of ARGUS Intelligence Platform", and 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." It publishes no dollar figure.
What that page does not say is whether ARGUS Enterprise can still be licensed on its own, and we are not going to guess. If you are renewing, those are the two questions to put to Altus Group directly: whether the standalone product still exists for you, and what a tiered, asset-based subscription costs at your asset count.
We publish no dollar figure for ARGUS because Altus Group publishes none. Any specific ARGUS price you see quoted on a forum or in a comparison post is unverified anecdote, including the ones that sound plausible.
Comparison
| Option | What its own page or file gives you | Where it breaks for a small GP | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|
| An Excel model you own | Formulas you can open, audit and hand over | Manual entry every deal; version drift | Depends on the source; verify before downloading |
| redIQ / Radix Underwriting | Multifamily rent roll and operating statement ingestion, scenarios, rehab modelling | No published price; access via demo request | Not published |
| DealCheck | Published prices, a $0 tier, 14 day trial on paid tiers | No waterfall, promote or GP/LP split in the published feature list | $0; $10/mo; $20/mo; yearly marked "3 months free" |
| Altyst | PDFs into an editable model on a deterministic engine | New and small; no trial; no ARGUS file; no PM, CRM or debt origination | $12/mo 5 deals; $24/mo 15; $99/mo 75 |
| ARGUS Enterprise (in ARGUS Intelligence) | Lease-by-lease modelling, DCF and capitalisation valuation, 40+ reports | Tiered, asset-based subscription; no dollar figure published | Not published |
What you will and will not find on Reddit
Treat this page, and every page competing for the same search, with suspicion. Our fetching tool cannot retrieve reddit.com at all, and we did not read a single Reddit thread while writing this page. Nothing here is quoted, paraphrased or summarised from Reddit. There are no usernames, no vote counts, no thread titles and no "the consensus is" claims, because we fetched none of it. If a competing page for this search hands you quotes and upvote totals, ask where they came from.
The questions worth taking to those subreddits yourself are narrow and answerable by practitioners: whether ARGUS earns its cost below institutional scale, whether an Excel template is enough at your deal count, how far to trust automated extraction on a scanned rent roll, and how much of a seller's T-12 survives normalisation. We would rather you asked operators those questions than took our word for any of it.
How to choose
- A counterparty in your deal requires a native ARGUS file. Buy ARGUS. Nothing on this page substitutes, and the question is worth asking them explicitly before you spend anything elsewhere.
- Two or three deals a year, and you enjoy modelling. An Excel model you can audit. You pay mostly in time. Check the terms of whatever library you download from.
- You screen a lot and commit to little. DealCheck's $0 Starter tier costs you nothing to test.
- Multifamily only, underwriting at volume, with a budget for demo-gated software. redIQ, now moving to Radix Underwriting. Ask them for a price.
- Your bottleneck is turning PDFs into an editable model, repeatedly, across more than one property type, and you want the price on the page. Altyst. With no trial, budget a month to find out.
- You want the math checked before spending anything. Ten free calculators at altyst.ai/tools, embeddable versions at altyst.ai/embed, a glossary at altyst.ai/glossary. No account needed for any of them.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need ARGUS to raise money from LPs on a multifamily deal?
Only your own counterparties can answer that, and it is one email to find out. The question is whether any LP, lender or valuation firm in your deal requires a native ARGUS file. If one does, that decides it. If none does, what an LP actually reads is the assumptions, sources and uses, debt terms, the waterfall and a sensitivity table, and the tool that produced them is your choice.
Can I just use ChatGPT or Claude to underwrite a rent roll?
Our view, and the reason Altyst is built the way it is: use a general model to read and summarise the document, not to do the arithmetic. These models are good at pulling a unit mix out of a messy PDF and unreliable at keeping hundreds of linked calculations consistent, so you can get a plausible IRR that does not tie to the cash flows above it. Keep the calculation layer in a deterministic engine or a spreadsheet you can audit, and check the extraction either way.
What is the cheapest way to underwrite a multifamily deal properly?
A well-built Excel model plus your own time. That is the floor and it is a legitimate answer, not a consolation prize. The real question is what your hours are worth: multiply your own hours of data entry per deal by the number of deals you underwrite in a year, and set that against the published subscriptions. DealCheck lists Plus at $10 a month and Pro at $20 a month, with a yearly option its pricing page marks "3 months free". Ours are $12 a month at the 5 deal tier and $24 at the 15 deal tier. If your time is genuinely free, the spreadsheet wins.
Will a lender accept a model that did not come out of ARGUS?
We cannot answer that for your lender, and neither can any comparison page. Ask them directly, before you buy software: whether they need a native ARGUS file, or an Excel file they can open and re-run alongside the rent roll and T-12. The question is about the format they want to receive, not about whose model is right, and one phone call settles it for your deal.
Is Altyst the right choice for a GP doing two deals a year?
Possibly not, and we would rather say so. At two deals a year the Excel route is reasonable and costs you time instead of money. Altyst earns its place when you underwrite far more deals than you close and re-run the same deal as terms move. It is new, small and has no free trial, so if trying before paying is a requirement, start with our free calculators or pick a tool that publishes a free tier.