What is a good ARGUS alternative for a small acquisitions team?

For office, retail, and industrial deals, Moraine builds a 10-year DCF from the OM, rent roll, and operating statement, with every extracted number linked to its source page. It costs $300 per month, month-to-month, after a free 14-day evaluation. It does not support multifamily.

Do I need ARGUS training to use Moraine?

No certification is required. The model is organized as Assumptions, Rent Roll, OpEx, Recoveries, and the pro forma, and the rent roll grid works like a spreadsheet. You can also make changes in plain language through the modeling agent, which proposes a changeset you accept or reject.

Can Moraine output something my IC or lender will accept if they expect ARGUS?

Moraine exports XLSX workbooks with flat headers and no merged cells, including a monthly cash flow designed to paste into ARGUS or pandas and an XIRR working sheet to rebuild the IRR in Excel. It does not produce an ARGUS file or a PDF.

How many deals can a two-person team underwrite on Individual?

Individual includes unlimited underwriting models, scenarios, Excel exports, the full report catalog, and the modeling agent for $300 per month.

Can two people work on the same Moraine model at the same time?

Not live. Moraine does not offer live multi-user editing, and team members and roles are managed by your Moraine contact rather than a settings screen. Team starts at $1,500 per month for five users and covers shared underwriting, firm assumptions, and centralized billing.

Can we save our house assumptions and reuse them on every deal?

Yes. Market leasing assumptions can be saved as firm presets and applied to the next deal, along with other house conventions, so you only change what is transaction-specific.

An ARGUS Alternative for a 2-Person Acquisitions Team

Short answer: if you are a two- or three-person acquisitions team underwriting office, retail, or industrial deals without an ARGUS seat or an analyst bench, Moraine builds a 10-year DCF directly from the OM, rent roll, and operating statement, links every extracted number to its source page, and exports Excel your IC can open. Individual is $300 per month, month-to-month, after a free 14-day evaluation (no card, no automatic charge). The honest limits: no multifamily, no PDF export, no live multi-user editing, and a qualified underwriter still reviews open items before IC.

Why small teams end up here

A small team sees the same deals as a fund with a 20-person acquisitions group, and it has to decide on them with a fraction of the hours. The usual options are all compromises. An ARGUS seat means a license, training, and someone who keys every lease by hand. Excel means a template that drifts from deal to deal and a rent roll re-typed at 11pm. An outsourced analyst means waiting, and paying for, a model you then have to audit.

I spent ten years on the buy side at Stockbridge. The bottleneck on a lean team was never judgment. It was the three days between receiving an OM and having a model good enough to argue about. Moraine is built to collapse that part.

Who this is for, and who it isn’t

This is for you if:

You run or staff a small acquisitions team at a PE fund, REIT, family office, or independent sponsor, and you underwrite office, retail, or industrial.
You need institutional-grade underwriting (lease-level rent steps, recoveries, market leasing assumptions, debt, waterfall) without a dedicated ARGUS seat.
You want to screen more OMs and go deep only on the ones that survive.

This isn’t for you if:

Your deals are multifamily, hotel, self-storage, or single-family.
Several analysts need to edit the same model simultaneously. There is no live multi-user editing today.
Your IC requires a formatted PDF package out of the box. Every export is XLSX.
Your procurement requires an issued SOC 2 Type II report today. The management assertion letter is complete; the audit report has not been issued.

The workflow, step by step

1. Log every deal in one place. The Acquisition pipeline is the first screen. Upload OM creates a deal row from a PDF; Rent roll + statement builds from one current rent roll and one operating statement; Add deal logs one by hand. Each row’s status tells you the next move: Ready to build, Building model, Review required, Model ready.

2. Build and walk away. Click Build. Extraction takes a few minutes, and you can leave the page. When the row reads Model ready, it also shows its open-item count (for example, blockers and advisories) so you know how much review is waiting.

3. Review, don’t re-key. The model opens on the intake report: census tiles, three tie-outs against the document’s stated figures (extracted rent, reconstructed recoveries, NOI), and open items with Jump links to the exact input that needs a decision. The Model trust chip in the top bar goes from RED toward GREEN as you work them down.

4. Apply your house view. Save your market leasing assumptions as a firm preset and apply them to the next deal. Set exit cap, growth, vacancy, and financing on Assumptions. Every edit recalculates the full model; the IRR in the scenario bar moves as you type.

5. Use the agent for the tedious edits. Type “waive admin fees for all inline tenants” or “add tenant Starbucks, 2,400 SF at $42 NNN” into the agent bar. It returns a changeset with each edit shown before and after; accept items individually or all at once, and one undo reverses the whole changeset.

6. Stress it. Scenarios puts Base, Downside, and any case you create side by side, each column a full engine run. Sensitivity gives a two-axis IRR grid where every cell is a complete model run, not an interpolation.

7. Export for IC. Compose a package in Export (Deal Snapshot, Annual Cash Flow, Rent Roll, Debt Schedule, Sensitivity Matrix, Source Lineage & Warnings) and export an XLSX workbook. Lock the model first if the workbook is going to committee.

Pricing, integrations, and limits that apply

Trial: 14 days of unlimited underwriting with Excel exports, starting when the first usable model is ready. No card, no automatic charge.
Individual: $300 per month for unlimited underwriting models, scenarios, Excel exports, the full report catalog, and the modeling agent. Month-to-month.
Team: from $1,500/month for five users, with shared seats, centralized billing, and standard onboarding.
Institutional: from $75,000/year for up to 10 users, unlimited first-pass underwriting, 15 diligence transactions, guided onboarding, and two legacy-model conversions. Enterprise: custom annual pricing, including SSO/SAML.
Due diligence suite: $3,000 one-time per deal, separate from Individual, for the deals that get to LOI.
Integrations: imports ARGUS Enterprise Excel report exports; exports XLSX that drops into existing ARGUS, Excel, and IC templates. No native Yardi or MRI connectors.
Limits: office, retail, and industrial only. Underwriting exports are XLSX, not PDF. No live multi-user editing; team members and roles are managed by your Moraine contact. Moraine will not infer lease status the documents don’t state.
Security: documents are never used to train Moraine’s or third-party models; firm data is isolated at the database level.

How this compares

ARGUS Enterprise. The industry standard, and the file many lenders and ICs still expect. It is a deep modeling tool, not a document reader: every lease, step, and recovery is entered by hand, and proficiency takes training. If you need ARGUS output, Moraine’s monthly cash flow workbook is designed to paste into it, so you can build in Moraine and hand off.

Excel templates. Free and flexible, with no audit trail from a cell back to the lease. Moraine’s Inspector traces any value to its formula and source page.

An outsourced or new hire analyst. Adds capacity, and adds a model you have to check. Our Moraine vs hiring analysts comparison covers that tradeoff. For the broader landscape, see our ARGUS software guide and CRE underwriting automation roundup.

Put your next OM through it

The fastest way to judge the fit is to build a deal you already underwrote by hand and compare.

Start a free trial → 14 days of unlimited underwriting with Excel exports, starting when the first usable model is ready. No card, no automatic charge.