Altyst as an ARGUS alternative

Start with what ARGUS is genuinely good at

Anyone selling you an alternative will skip this part. It is the most important section on the page, because if you do not know what you would be giving up you cannot tell whether the trade is worth making.

ARGUS Enterprise, sold by Altus Group as part of the ARGUS Intelligence Platform, has been the vocabulary of institutional commercial valuation for decades. That word, vocabulary, is the point. When an appraiser, a lender and a buyer all model the same office building, they are not just running the same arithmetic. They are using the same names for the same things: the recovery structure, the market leasing assumption, the rollover profile, the option that has not been exercised yet. Agreement on vocabulary is what lets three parties argue about one number instead of about four models.

Which produces the fact that decides this whole question for some readers. On institutional office, retail and industrial deals, the ARGUS file is frequently part of the deliverable. If somebody has asked you for one by name, there is no alternative to evaluate. Renew, and stop reading here. This page is not going to talk you out of a contractual requirement, and any page that tries is not being straight with you.

The depth is real too. Lease by lease, with options, recoveries, reimbursement methods and expense stops expressed the way the lease actually reads, is genuinely hard to model, and ARGUS has had a very long time to get it right.

And the training is an asset, not an overhead. Altus publishes a two-day public class aimed at new-to-intermediate users, private training, self-paced e-learning, and a certification exam, which it describes as an industry recognized designation. A firm that has put a team through that has bought interchangeability: any certified analyst can open any model. That is a real return, and it is why a renewal is often the rational call even for a firm that grumbles about it.

Hold on to all of that. The case for anything else has to be made against it, not around it.

Where the friction actually is

Notice what none of the above is about. Not one of those strengths is about the first two hours of a deal.

A package arrives. A PDF offering memorandum on the broker's layout. A rent roll in Excel, in whatever columns that broker happens to use. A trailing twelve that was printed, signed, and scanned back in at a slight angle. A debt quote in the body of an email. Every figure that reaches your model gets there because a person read it off one document and typed it into another.

That is true whichever modeling environment you use. ARGUS does not create that problem and no modeling environment solves it, because the job of a modeling environment starts after the data is in. The model is empty until somebody fills it.

So the two costs are these. First, the retyping, which is where transposition errors happen, on exactly the numbers that matter, because the numbers that matter are the ones there are most of. Second, the screen. You look at far more deals than you buy. Most of the underwriting work in any acquisitions shop is spent establishing that a deal is a pass, and a tool priced and trained for the deals you win is an expensive way to prove that thirty deals were not worth winning.

What Altyst does instead

Upload the offering memorandum, the rent roll and the T-12. A full underwriting model comes back, and every number in it is editable.

• It reads PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, plain text, and a photograph of a page. Scanned documents go through optical character recognition, because the T-12 always turns out to be a scan.
• Extracted values arrive as proposals, not as facts. Each one carries its source and a confidence, and you accept or overwrite it before it enters the model. The documents are also tied out against each other, so when the rent roll and the trailing twelve disagree about in-place income the conflict is raised for you to settle rather than quietly resolved by whichever document was parsed last.
• Every financial result is computed by a deterministic engine in exact decimal arithmetic. Not by a language model predicting a plausible number. The same inputs always produce the same result, which is the only property that makes any downstream audit possible.
• Every input traces back to the document it was read from, carrying the exact text and, where the extractor can pin it, the page. Click a number and see the formula underneath it.
• Change any assumption and returns, cash flow, debt and the downside case recompute together, in seconds, as many times as you like. Repricing is never metered.

The sentence that matters: nobody types the rent roll in.

Underneath, the model is not a thin one. Debt sizes itself on a loan-to-value cap, on a minimum debt service coverage test, or on a debt yield floor, with mezzanine, interest-only periods, additional tranches, and a bridge to refinance. Rollover carries TI, LC, downtime, renewal probability and expense stops. The partnership waterfall does a preferred return, return of capital, an optional catch-up, a residual promote and multiple internal rate of return hurdles. There is an after-tax overlay with straight-line and bonus depreciation, passive-loss carryforward, and depreciation recapture plus capital gains at sale, with an optional 1031 exchange, at rates you supply. The waterfall and the after-tax overlay are both off until you turn them on, because a model that silently applies a promote or a tax rate you did not choose is worse than no model.

The asset classes are covered one by one rather than by relabeling a single model: multifamily, single-family and short-term rental, office, medical office, retail, industrial, flex, warehouse, self-storage, mixed-use, hotel, and land or development.

Side by side, on the things that decide it

Two honest notes on that table. The ARGUS column is deliberately thin on anything that cannot be verified from Altus's own published pages, because a comparison table that guesses at a rival's current feature set is wrong within a quarter and wrong in our name. And the price row does not carry a number for ARGUS because Altus does not publish one. Third-party sites quote figures for it that differ from each other by an order of magnitude, which tells you exactly how much those figures are worth. Get the quote.

The three questions a skeptical analyst asks

Can I trust the numbers?

The right thing to be suspicious of is the phrase "AI underwriting", and you should stay suspicious of it, including here. So, precisely:

AI is used for one job on this platform, reading documents and proposing values. It never performs the calculation. Every financial result comes from a deterministic engine doing exact decimal arithmetic, so the same inputs produce the same output on every run. Run the same deal twice and compare, on any product you are evaluating: if an IRR moves between two runs on identical inputs, nothing downstream of it can be audited, not the memo, not the committee deck, not the answer you give a lender.

Extraction is the part that can be wrong, and that is exactly why an extracted value is a proposal rather than a fact. It shows you what it read, where it read it, and how confident it was, and it waits for you. Documents are tied out against each other and disagreements come to you. Every model also carries a Model Checks tab, and a separate evaluator in our test suite re-reads the exported workbook's own formulas, computes them, and fails the build if any of them disagrees with the engine.

What we do not have: SOC 2, ISO 27001, or a comparable certification. We say so here and on the security page, and you should ask every vendor on your list the same question and get the answer in writing.

The only test that settles this is yours. Run a deal you have already underwritten by hand and compare line by line.

Can I export to Excel?

Yes, and this is the part most people do not expect from a product in this category.

The exported workbook carries live formulas on its core tabs. EGI is computed as gross potential rent plus other income less vacancy and credit loss. NOI is EGI less operating expenses. Levered cash flow is unlevered cash flow less debt service. The IRR row is a real IRR over the cash-flow range. Open it in Excel, change a cell on a live tab, and the sheet recalculates the way a model you built yourself would.

Every workbook carries Cover, Model, Cash Flow, Debt, Provenance and Model Checks, and a deal picks up more depending on what it needs, among them Sources and Uses, Scenarios, Sensitivities, Reprice, Partnership, After-Tax, Rent Roll, Tenant Schedule, Risks and Diligence.

Two things worth knowing, and worth asking every other vendor:

1. Not every tab recalculates. Some are computed by the engine and written in as values. The Cover tab names which tabs carry live formulas and states plainly that the rest do not, so nobody discovers it by editing a cell and watching nothing move. That line is generated by scanning the finished file for formula cells, not typed by hand, so it cannot claim a tab is live when its numbers are pasted.
2. The formulas are checked, not assumed. The evaluator described above re-reads them and reconciles them to the engine on every test run.

Ask everyone on your shortlist for a sample export before you sign anything, and open it. Whether the cells contain formulas or numbers is the fastest single test of how seriously a product takes handing the work back to you.

What about my existing models?

Keep them, and hear the limitation plainly: Altyst does not import ARGUS files, and it does not import your firm's Excel template. We would rather say that here than let you find it out on day three.

What that means in practice:

• If an ARGUS file is a deliverable you owe somebody, that requirement does not move. Keep the license for the deals that carry it.
• The common pattern is not replacement, it is sequencing. Screen and underwrite in Altyst, where the documents do the data entry. Export the workbook. Carry the handful of deals that survive the screen into whatever your firm uses for the deals it actually bids on.
• Your house convention lives in your template, and no import wizard has ever moved institutional memory. That is an argument for keeping the template, not for retyping every rent roll.
• Nothing is trapped. The exports are files. They open without us, and they stay accessible if you cancel. Only new paid processing pauses.

Where Altyst is the weaker choice

A comparison page where one column wins every row is an advertisement. So:

• An ARGUS file as a deliverable. Covered above, and it is the whole answer for some readers.
• The deepest lease-by-lease work. Altyst models rollover with TI, LC, downtime, renewal probability and expense stops, which covers the large majority of office, retail and industrial deals. For a lease with a genuinely unusual recovery or option structure, bring your own lease and test it before you decide anything.
• A structure the engine has not anticipated. A participating mortgage, an odd ground lease reset, a promote that pays differently before and after a refinance. Export the workbook and build that leg in Excel, which is exactly what the export exists for.
• Certifications. We hold none.
• Certified interchangeability. If your value comes from every analyst in a 40-person team opening any model with identical training, that is a real thing you would be walking away from.

Test it in one afternoon

Do not take the table above on faith, ours or anyone else's. Run a real deal you have already underwritten.

1. Upload the actual package, including the ugly scanned page. Extraction quality on a clean broker Excel file tells you nothing about extraction quality.
2. Check the extracted rent roll against your own tie-out. Look at unit count, down and model units, and concessions specifically.
3. Rebuild your debt: size on loan-to-value, on a minimum debt service coverage ratio, and on a debt yield, and check whether the constraint that binds is the one you expected.
4. Push one assumption you know is load-bearing and confirm the downside case moved with it.
5. Reprice to a target return and see whether the number it gives you is a bid you would make.
6. Export the workbook, open it in Excel, and change a cell on a live tab.
7. Read the Provenance tab as if you were the person on the investment committee who did not build the model.

If step 7 does not answer more questions than your current process would, none of the rest matters.

What it costs

Plans are Individual $12, Professional $24, Team $99 a month, each with a published price per additional deal and a published monthly ceiling on new deals. The unit is one deal creation. Uploading documents, running the underwriting, editing assumptions, recomputing and exporting are never metered, so repricing a deal eleven times costs the same as repricing it once. Unused deal credits roll over. AI document reading draws on an allowance carried by each deal, included or additional, and when a deal has used its allowance the model, the edits and every export keep working, and your other deals are unaffected. There is no implementation fee, no annual commitment, and no quote to wait for. Full detail on pricing.

ARGUS, ARGUS Enterprise and the ARGUS Intelligence Platform are trademarks of Altus Group Limited. Altyst is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Altus Group. ARGUS is named here only to describe how commercial real estate models are commonly built, and to answer a question buyers ask by name. Statements about ARGUS on this page reflect Altus Group's own published materials as of 6 August 2026 and may have changed since. Confirm anything that matters with Altus directly.