Altyst vs an analyst or an outsourced underwriting desk
A person brings judgment, which no engine has. Software brings iteration and consistency, which no person can sustain across a full pipeline. Most firms need both, and the answer usually falls out of how many packages arrive in a month.
The split that works
Send it to a person when
- The deal has already survived the screen and the money is real.
- The question is judgment, not arithmetic: whether the submarket supports the rent, whether the sponsor is credible, what the seller will actually take.
- Something in the structure has no precedent, and someone has to decide how it should be modeled at all.
- You need a human to defend the assumptions in a room, out loud, under questioning.
Do it in software when
- Twenty packages arrived this month and eighteen of them are a pass. Paying for judgment on the eighteen is the expensive mistake.
- You are iterating. The fifth reprice after the seller's counter costs nothing in software and costs a favor from a person.
- You want the same model shape on every deal, so this week's is comparable to last quarter's.
- The seller's package is confidential enough that fewer parties is better.
- You want the model in your hands, not in someone else's file.
The two things being compared are not the same thing
An analyst, in house or outsourced, does two separable jobs. One is mechanical: read the package, tie the rent roll to the trailing statement, build the pro forma, size the debt, produce the memo. The other is judgment: decide whether the rent growth in the sponsor's model is defensible, whether the expense ratio is credible for that vintage in that submarket, whether the story holds.
The first job is where the hours go. The second is what you are actually paying for.
Software does the first job well and does not do the second at all. Nothing in Altyst has an opinion on whether a submarket supports the rent. It computes exactly what you tell it, the same way every time, and shows you where each input came from. That is the whole product. A comparison that blurs that boundary is not worth reading.
Turnaround, and what it does to a pipeline
The constraint on a person is a queue. Deals arrive in bursts, and the queue lengthens exactly when the market is busiest, which is exactly when a bid deadline is shortest. The constraint on software is your own attention.
That difference matters most at the top of the funnel. A firm looking at twenty packages a month passes on most of them. Every hour of skilled human time spent on a deal that was always going to be a pass is a real cost, and it is invisible because it never shows up next to a deal that closed.
Iteration, which is where the cost hides
Underwriting is not one calculation. It is a first pass, then the exit cap the investment committee actually believes, then the debt quote that came back different, then the seller's counter, then the version where you assume the tenant does not renew.
Each of those is a round trip with a person. With software, changing an assumption recomputes returns, cash flow, debt and the downside case together, and repricing to the bid that hits your return is a single operation rather than a request.
This is also where the meter matters. In Altyst the unit is one deal creation. Recompute, edits and exports are never metered, so the eleventh reprice costs exactly what the first one did. Plans are Individual $12, Professional $24, Team $99 a month; the full detail is on Pricing.
Consistency across a book
Two analysts build two different models. So does one analyst in March and the same analyst in November. The line items drift, the vacancy convention drifts, the exit assumption gets a new treatment on a deal where it mattered, and by the time you want to compare this quarter's pipeline against last year's you are comparing artifacts, not deals.
An engine does the same thing every time. That is a limitation when the deal is unusual and an advantage across a pipeline, and it is the reason the comparison view across deals is meaningful at all: the numbers were produced the same way.
Confidentiality, plainly
A seller's package with a rent roll in it is confidential information about people's tenancies. Every additional party who handles it is an additional place it exists. That is not an accusation about any service provider. It is arithmetic.
Where documents go in Altyst is published rather than described: they live in your workspace, the subprocessors are named on the Legal pages, uploads are not sold and are not used to train third-party models, and deleting a deal removes its documents and results and produces a receipt, with a workspace deletion doing the same across every deal in it and naming anything still pending on the receipt. Whatever you use, ask for the same specifics in writing.
Who ends up holding the model
At the end of an outsourced engagement you have a file. At the end of a software workflow you have a model you can open, change, and re-run, plus the exports: an Excel workbook on live formulas, a one-page memo, an editable deck, a lender package, and an offering summary.
The difference shows up the week after, when the investment committee asks for the version where the renovation is phased over two years instead of one.
Where we would draw the line
Use software for the funnel and a person for the decisions. Screen everything in Altyst, so that the deals that reach a human have already been tied out, modeled, stressed, and priced, and the human hours go to the handful that deserve them.
If you have no in-house analyst at all, software gets you a defensible model and the documents an investment committee expects. It does not get you someone to argue with about the rent comps, and you should not buy it expecting that.
Questions people ask at this point
Can underwriting software replace an acquisitions analyst?
It replaces the mechanical half of the work: reading the package, tying the rent roll to the trailing statement, building the pro forma, sizing debt, and producing the memo. It does not replace judgment about a submarket, a sponsor, or a story, and it has no opinion about whether an assumption is realistic. Most firms use software to screen the pipeline and human time on the deals that survive.
What is the real cost difference?
The visible cost is a subscription against hours. The hidden cost is iteration: with a person, every reprice is another round trip, and with software it is free. In Altyst the metered unit is deal creation, so recomputing, editing and exporting a deal cost nothing beyond it. Current plan prices are published on the Pricing page.
How does this compare on turnaround?
A person is a queue, and the queue is longest exactly when the market is busy and bid deadlines are short. Software has no queue, so the throughput limit is your own attention. That matters most at the top of the funnel, where most packages are a pass and human hours spent on them never show up as a cost.
Is it safe to put a seller's confidential package into software?
Ask for specifics from any party you send it to, human or software. For Altyst: documents live in your own workspace with isolation enforced server side, subprocessors are published by name, uploads are not sold and are not used to train third-party models, and deleting a deal removes its documents and results and produces a receipt. A workspace deletion does the same across every deal in it, and its receipt names anything still pending. Altyst holds no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, which the Security page states directly.
What do I actually get at the end?
A live model you can reopen and change, plus exports: an Excel workbook on live formulas, a one-page investment memo PDF, an editable PowerPoint deck, a deck PDF, a lender package, and an offering summary. Every figure in them reconciles to the model, and every extracted figure carries the document and the excerpt it was read from.
Keep comparing
Test it on a deal you have already underwritten
That is the only comparison that settles anything. Bring the documents you already have.