Commercial real estate underwriting: a buyer's reference

What acquisitions analysts underwrite in: the Reddit question, sourced

Last reviewed 16 September 2026

This page is about what exists, not about what everybody does. Every claim below about a named product is quoted from that vendor's own page and linked. What you will not find here is a number for how many analysts use each one, because we have no survey to cite and will not invent one. The checklist near the end is tool agnostic and works in whatever you underwrite in today.

The layers, and what each vendor claims

ARGUS, in Altus Group's own words

Altus Group describes ARGUS Enterprise as lease by lease modeling for a transparent view of all assured income, supporting multiple methods including Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and Traditional Capitalisation Valuations: Hardcore Valuations, Term and Reversion, and Initial Yield, with 40+ industry-standard asset and portfolio reports (altusgroup.com).

It now sits inside a larger platform. Altus says 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. No figure is posted, so it is a quote. That page does not say whether ARGUS Enterprise can still be bought on its own, so neither do we.

Altus also runs the ARGUS Software Certification (ASC) program, which it describes as an opportunity for CRE professionals to validate their knowledge on ARGUS and earn an industry-recognized designation. Training is a real line item, so count it when you compare.

Rockport VAL is the other name in this layer. The page we read makes no claim about ARGUS file compatibility, Excel export or price, so we are not making one on its behalf.

Which layer you actually need

This follows from what you have to hand over, not from the size of your firm.

• If the deliverable is your own memo and your own committee, the model plus a way to stop retyping documents is the whole stack.
• If a counterparty has asked for a lease by lease ARGUS file, nothing else in the table above produces one, and no amount of spreadsheet work substitutes for it.
• If deals arrive faster than anyone can key them in, that is an extraction problem. The question to put to each vendor is whether you can correct a wrong figure afterwards and have everything downstream update.
• If nobody can say which deals are live and who owns them, that is a pipeline problem, and a better model will not fix it.

Why the spreadsheet is hard to displace

Our view, as people who build an alternative to it, not a survey finding:

1. The model is an argument. When a number gets challenged, by a credit officer or a partner asking why insurance grew at that rate, you have to be able to answer by pointing at the cell that produced it.
2. Deals are odd. A ground lease reset, a seller funded rate buydown, an earn out on lease-up. A spreadsheet absorbs one-offs; a fixed schema resists them.
3. The switching cost is the template, not the software. The template encodes the conventions: expense categories, reserve treatment, waterfall mechanics.
4. Anything else has to beat the boring part. A tool wins by removing the typing without removing your ability to change a number afterwards. Take the second half away and the spreadsheet comes back.

What to check, whatever you underwrite in

Tool agnostic. Run it against your own workbook this afternoon.

• Gross potential rent is total scheduled rent for every unit at market or asking rent, vacant units included. It is not unit count times average in-place rent. Build it the wrong way and vacancy loss is either double counted or missing entirely.
• Keep the deductions apart. Loss to lease, vacancy, concessions, bad debt and non-revenue units are five lines, not one. Collapsing them hides what you are actually forecasting.
• Tie the rent roll to the T-12. Annualise in-place rent from the roll, set it against rental income on the trailing statement, and find the reason for any gap before you grow anything forward.
• NOI excludes debt service, always. Capex reserves are the ambiguous part: some models take reserves above the NOI line, some below. Say which you mean, because cap rates built on the two conventions are not comparable.
• DSCR is NOI divided by annual debt service. Debt yield is NOI divided by the loan amount and ignores rate and amortisation by design. Check which year's NOI each one is built on, and whether it is the same year in both.
• Equity multiple is total distributions divided by equity invested. It disagrees with IRR on purpose, since one ignores time and the other is dominated by it. Show both, with the hold period next to them.
• Get the IRR inputs right before arguing about the output. Initial equity goes in negative, distributions and sale proceeds positive. Evenly spaced periods can use the period based function; anything irregular needs the date aware one, with the sale date matching the final cash flow date. A misaligned date changes the answer without changing anything you can see.
• Write the exit down explicitly: the exit cap rate, and the exact NOI it is applied to, including whether that is the final year or the year after. An off-by-one there moves the IRR more than the arguing does.
• Rollover costs left at zero are a tell. Tenant improvements and leasing commissions sitting at zero usually mean a lease-up was never costed. If you do not know the number, put in an obvious placeholder rather than a blank.
• Check units before logic. Monthly against annual rent, per square foot per year against per month, square feet against unit count. Magnitude errors survive review because the layout still looks right.
• Sensitise the exit cap rate and the interest rate first. A two variable table on those two says more about the deal than more time spent on the expense lines.

To check one figure without opening anything, our calculators are free and need no account: NOI, DSCR, debt yield, cap rate, cash-on-cash, break-even occupancy and others. There is also a free ten year multifamily acquisition model in Excel and a glossary. Take them and never come back; that is a fine outcome.

Where we fit, and where we do not

Altyst reads an offering memorandum, rent roll, T-12, lease or a pasted listing link and builds an editable model: rent roll, T-12 normalisation, growth, vacancy, lease rollover with TI and leasing commissions, debt sizing, equity waterfall, DCF, IRR, equity multiple, DSCR, cash-on-cash, exit assumptions, scenarios, sensitivity tables. The AI does the 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 to an assumption you can edit. Exports are Excel, PDF and PowerPoint, across ten property types. Pricing is $12 a month for 5 deals and $4 per extra deal, $24 for 15 deals and $3 per extra, or $99 for a 5 seat team with 75 deals and $3 per extra. No free tier, no free trial.

It does not do property management, lease administration, CRM, listings or debt origination, and it cannot open or produce ARGUS files. If your counterparty wants an ARGUS file, we are not the answer. It is also new, small and bootstrapped, which is fair to weigh against a tool with a certification program behind it.

FAQ

How many acquisitions analysts use each of these tools?

This page does not say. No adoption figure, percentage or share appears anywhere on it, because we have no survey to cite. Treat any page that hands you one without naming its source as a guess dressed up as research.

Do I actually need ARGUS?

It depends on who receives your work. Altus Group describes ARGUS Enterprise as lease by lease modeling, supporting discounted cash flow alongside traditional capitalisation valuations. Altus posts no figure for it and says pricing is flexible, tiered and scales with your business, so it is quote based. If nobody in your deal chain has asked for that file, you would be buying compatibility nobody has asked you for.

Is a spreadsheet really enough for a small shop?

It can be, on one condition: the template has to be one you can explain. The usual failure is not the spreadsheet, it is an inherited workbook with hardcoded numbers buried inside formulas that nobody dares touch. Rebuild it once, label the assumptions, and it will outlive several subscriptions.

What do extraction tools actually save?

Typing, and the transcription errors that come with typing. They do not decide rent growth, exit cap rate or expense assumptions. Judge them on whether you can correct a wrong figure afterwards and have everything downstream update.

Can these produce a file my lender or JV partner can open?

Ask per tool, and do not accept a demo as the answer. Ask which file comes out, in what format, and whether the formulas survive or the export is flat values. Altyst exports Excel, PDF and PowerPoint, and cannot open or produce ARGUS files.

Is there a cheap stack that works?

One spreadsheet template you can explain, the habit of tying the rent roll to the T-12, and a written assumption sheet you reuse. Add paid tools only where you can name what they take off your desk.

Did you read Reddit to write this?

No, and we quote nothing from it. No post, user, thread or vote count is quoted, paraphrased or characterised anywhere on this page. Everything attributed to a named product came from that vendor's own page, listed in the sources below. For first hand practitioner opinion, go and read the threads yourself; this page is the sourced half of that answer, not a substitute for it.

Sources

Fetched 16 September 2026, and the basis for every third-party claim above. Nothing about a named product appears on this page that did not come from one of these.

• https://www.altusgroup.com/argus/argus-enterprise/ (ARGUS Enterprise: lease by lease modeling, valuation methods, 40+ reports, platform bundling, tiered pricing language)
• https://www.altusgroup.com/argus/training/ (ARGUS Software Certification program)
• https://www.therockportgroup.com/ (Rockport VAL capabilities and positioning)
• https://www.macabacus.com/ (Office add-in, 50+ model checks, stated audience)
• https://clik.ai/ (spreading T12s, rent rolls and operating statements; bespoke Excel models)
• https://www.archer.re/ (multifamily focus; rent roll and T12 parsing claim)
• https://www.dealpath.com/ (self description; comparing underwriting models)

None of the pages above published a price, so we quote none. Some of those vendors may post pricing elsewhere on their own sites; we did not go looking, and you should check before budgeting.