Argus software to screen investments ? alternate recommendations?

[Scott Lieberg]

Is anyone using Argus software to model your potential acquisitions? Or do you use an alternative screening product for analysing weighted average lease terms, value add plays, and other data points for your sponsor packages. Most of the major commercial brokers (CBRE, JLL, Cush Wake, and others) are using Argus or the equivalent. What are the pros, cons, and alternatives to Argus? Thanks in advance for your feedback.

[Evan Polaski]

@Scott Lieberg, Argus gets very pricy very quickly.  Even the big players I know of will do the quick and dirty underwriting in excel to make sure it pencils out, before going into Argus for full underwriting.

While it is the industry standard and has a lot of very powerful features, I think it is often overkill, and time intensive to be reviewing deals.  There are companies that are working with multibillion dollar portfolios that still use excel models for acquisition modeling.  And often times, the learning curve is much lower, and exponentially less expensive.

That being said, most major accounting/ERP systems (Yardi, MRI, etc) have modeling pieces as well, but these are not as widely used, and in my experiences, much more cumbersome than Argus or Excel.