Cap Orbit vs ARGUS: AI-Native Underwriting vs the Legacy DCF Standard

Credit where due

The standard is the standard for a reason.

ARGUS is the valuation language of institutional real estate, with the broadest installed base in the market: lenders ask for the ARGUS run, appraisers deliver in it, and when a counterparty says send the model, the ARGUS file is often what they mean. No AI product erases that this year.

The product itself has moved. As of 2026, Altus Group no longer sells ARGUS Enterprise standalone; it has been migrated into ARGUS Intelligence, a cloud-enabled unified platform that keeps the core DCF, cash-flow, and asset management capabilities. ARGUS Assist adds AI on top: valuation analysts, brokers, and asset managers can put questions to the model in plain language, change assumptions, re-run, and generate valuation outputs.

So where the mandate requires ARGUS, keep ARGUS. The practical question, the one this page exists to answer, is what happens to all the work that surrounds the run: the broker materials nobody has keyed in, the firm’s own workbook, the memo, the close, and the hold.

Where Cap Orbit wins

The underwrite starts in the documents, not the entry screen.

A deal does not arrive as assumptions. It arrives as an offering memo, a rent roll buried in a workbook tab or a scanned exhibit, and a T-12 with the seller’s story baked into the expense lines. Cap Orbit starts there. The rent roll comes out unit by unit, every figure traced to the exact file, sheet, and row or page, footed to the document’s own stated totals. The operating statement is normalized onto a standard expense set with an NOI bridge, and the extract surfaces the flags an analyst would otherwise hunt by hand: occupied units with no lease expiry, duplicate units, zero rent on occupied space.

The model that follows is a real Excel workbook built to the institutional standard for the asset class: live formulas, no hardcodes, inputs color-coded against formulas, recalculated and checked before it is delivered. Base, Upside, and Downside re-price off one switch, the sensitivity grid flexes exit cap and exit NOI, and debt sizes to the binding constraint among LTV, LTC, DSCR, and debt yield. Assumptions move one driver at a time, each proposing current to proposed with a one-line rationale, and nothing writes into the model until the analyst accepts it.

And this is one terminal with the run of the deal file, not an entry screen with a question layer on top. It reads across every document in the deal at once, the offering memo, the rent roll, the T-12, the loan agreement, the firm’s templates, and it creates and edits real work product: Excel workbooks with live formulas, Word memos in the house voice, decks, and bound PDFs, written back into the deal file. One instruction carries the job end to end, reading the documents, normalizing the statement, building the workbook, staging the memo, with the analyst approving each consequential step. It is the difference between keying assumptions and getting back the workbook, memo, and record.

Then the work keeps going where the valuation engine stops. The IC memo drafts return-first in the firm’s house voice, every figure pulled from the model’s computed cells or footnoted to a cited document. Closing reconciles the settlement statement against the contract, the loan, and the underwrite, then writes the trued-up going-in basis back into the model. Asset management closes each period against the budget and the original underwrite on a record that only adds and never overwrites. Altus’s materials describe valuation and asset management modeling; the path from broker materials to committee to close is the part the firm still builds by hand around it.

Format and lock-in

A platform file, or your own workbook.

The ARGUS model lives inside the ARGUS Intelligence platform, in the platform’s own format. That is part of what makes it the standard: a counterparty can open your run because everyone keys to the same engine. It is also the lock. The work is legible inside the platform, and every model the firm has ever built there adds its weight to the next renewal.

Cap Orbit’s output is a native .xlsx in the firm’s own template. Attach the house workbook to a deal and the model fills and extends it in place, preserving sheet structure, fonts, colors, and number formats; with no template attached it offers a restrained institutional default and asks before filling anything in. The workbook opens in Excel on any team, no seat required to read it, and if the firm ever walks away, the models stay behind, in its own files, still working.

ARGUS keeps its own format closed, so where a mandate still requires an ARGUS run, your analyst keys it from a clean, source-traced extract instead of a raw PDF.

Buyer choice

Run both, or skip the re-keying.

Where the mandate requires ARGUS, run both. The fund’s process is built on it, the lender’s checklist names it, the valuers report in it: ARGUS stays the valuation of record. Cap Orbit takes the rest of the deal, the document work, the firm’s own workbook, the memo, the closing reconciliation, the hold, and your analyst keys the ARGUS run from a source-traced extract instead of a raw PDF.

Where the mandate does not require it, the renewal is a fair moment to ask what the seats still do. Plenty of equity shops underwrite in their own Excel anyway and keep ARGUS because it has always been there. If the committee reads your workbook, not the platform’s output, Cap Orbit builds that workbook from the documents, with the trace, and the re-keying stops.

Which firm yours is tends to be obvious from where the last three deals were actually modeled. The modeling standard is yours to choose.