Cap Orbit vs ARGUS: From Deal Documents to the Model

Credit where due

Why ARGUS remains the valuation standard.

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.

Keep ARGUS where the mandate requires it. Then look at the work around the valuation: reading broker materials, building your workbook and memo, closing, and tracking ownership.

Where Cap Orbit wins

Start with what the broker sent.

Cap Orbit reads offering memos, buried rent rolls, and scanned exhibits. Extract the rent roll unit by unit, trace figures to file, sheet, and row, and reconcile source totals. Normalize the operating statement with an NOI bridge. Flag missing lease expiries, duplicate units, and zero rent on occupied space.

The model that follows is your own Excel workbook, filled in place. Only input cells are written. Every formula is preserved. Base, Upside, and Downside re-price off one switch; the sensitivity grid flexes exit cap and exit NOI; debt sizes to the binding constraint among LTV, LTC, DSCR, and debt yield. Assumptions the terminal proposes arrive one driver at a time, current to proposed, and nothing writes until the analyst accepts. Or type the number into the cell yourself, watch the formulas recalculate, and the terminal’s next pass reads what you changed.

Read the documents, fill the workbook, and revise it as your view changes. Draft and review the deal documents in the same terminal.

Then the work keeps going where the valuation engine stops. The IC memo drafts return-first in the house voice, every figure from the model or a cited document, and opens ready for your markup, every change tracked. A closing checklist follows: each condition, its owner, its date, its status. Closing reconciles the settlement statement against the contract, the loan, and the underwrite, then writes the trued-up basis back into the model. Through the hold, the asset-management trackers close each period against budget and underwrite. 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

Keep the model in 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 produces a native .xlsx in your template. Preserve sheet structure, fonts, colors, and number formats as the terminal fills it. Or choose a house model by sector and strategy. Edit the spreadsheet in Cap Orbit or open it in Excel without repair or a Cap Orbit seat. The files keep working if your firm leaves.

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

Buyer choice

Keep the valuation you need. Simplify the work around it.

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, your own workbook, the memo, the close and its reconciliation, the hold.

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 fills that workbook from the documents, and your team keeps working in it. 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.