Best CRE Analytics software?
I am being tasked with researching software for a CRE company that is fairly well established. It's being passed down from my friend's father to him, and with it a change of culture and a bit of innovation to their valuation tactics.

As of right now they are doing most of their cash flow analysis by hand, and digging through online data sets to find out information like traffic flow, demographics and average lease prices in a given area. My assumption is that there is software out there that is helping companies like this get into the 21st century.

In the brief amount of research I've done, I've found Argus, Tetrad Sitewise Pro, Esri, GGBIS, Market Maps and something called Reonomy. I'm sure there are others, but just not sure where to even start.

Is there a good place to see some comparisons or to get a sense of whether or not I'm even ready for this type of software? 

Thank you!!

edit: sounds like Argus and Costar 
[{"id": "dfqwexk", "text": "Argus for cash flows, costar for market data.  They are expensive though.", "replies": [{"id": "dfqwlns", "text": "Yea, and they don't offer anything other than a video demo on their site. If we already have someone that is doing financial modeling in Excel, is Argus worth the investment?\n\nI'll check out Costar. Thanks so much for the info btw, I've posted similar things around other sites (BiggerPockets most recently) and none are getting responded to.", "replies": [{"id": "dfqwplk", "text": "If you are modeling multi-tenant buildings with over 5-10 tenants then argus is worthwhile.  Otherwise a simple excel model is pretty easy.  \n", "replies": [], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dfqxcex", "text": "I actually built an excel model that mimics what argus does, it has 6 market leasing assumptions, and the template alone is over 7 MBS. I would send but i dont know if I want to sell it or not as a cheaper alternative. It took about a month to create and some formulas are HUGE. Plus its not very user friendly yet, it would be difficult to understand as someone who didnt build it. ", "replies": [{"id": "dfqxhy3", "text": "This is actually something I was just discussing with my team. If we bought Argus, how long would it take to learn it? To @b6passat point we are already managing properties that are at the size he describes as a good threshold. \n\nMy decision lies with whether or not I want to take the time to learn it, or if I want to simply hire a consultant that already has experience in it? \n\nAlso, if you built something similar to it in excel, then are you saying Argus is basically just an excel sheet on steroids? ", "replies": [{"id": "dfqxopg", "text": "From my very limited experience, Argus does not seem THAT hard to learn. Its all about analyzing the revenues, reimbursements, expenses etc of historical operating statements in excel and then translating that to Argus and then filling in Market Rent, lease up timing and expenses by using market data. But I would think it wouldnt take but a month to learn Argus, but like I said I'm pretty new to Argus and I'm building my first model now.\n\nI would say basically, yes, argus is excel on steroids. Granted, I was taking excel past its limits to create this argus-like excel model and you have to scroll and scroll to see the complete formulas in some of these cells (if, and, or, index, match, search, find etc).", "replies": [], "depth": 3}, {"id": "dfqxrug", "text": "Also, Argus is pretty much the industry standard right now. I see it used all the time in Offering Memorandums, Broker Opinion of Values and appraisals. So even if you had an excel version, it might be looked at with a critical eye by others. I believe Argus is about $3000 a year and I would just pay for it if your company has the budget.", "replies": [{"id": "dfqy4jg", "text": "This is great, thank you. Our CFO is a tax guy right now, and has a ton of experience using Excel for financial modeling. I will probably suggest that he be the one to learn it, rather than me. \n\nI however, do want to begin setting up some dashboards with KPIs that are analyzing data from disparate sources. One of my ideas was to take all new listing data, run it through some calculations, and spit out the properties that have high cash flow, or those that are undervalued.\n\nI'm wondering, is the data that I would need to build something like that even available? Is that what CoStar would do?", "replies": [{"id": "dfqyxdz", "text": "Man, in my opinion, this is the ULTIMATE challenge facing commercial real estate right now- data availability- and MANY technology companies are working to fix that problem and build that platform. CoStar was the original one, I think, and many people use it. However, Real Capital Analytics is amazing and can give you market data based on the real time data that they have information on. There are SO many disparate sources and its all very overwhelming, extremely expensive and extremely time consuming to aggregate and synthesize. I thought that I should one day start a business that creates the ultimate Bloomberg terminal for all commercial real estate, but there are many people trying to dominate this space right now and it seems extremely costly and difficult to do.\n\nhttps://www.rcanalytics.com/\nhttps://www.xceligent.com/\nhttp://www.forumanalytics.com/\nhttp://www.discern.com/\nhttps://www.reonomy.com/\nhttps://compstak.com/ (lease comparables)", "replies": [{"id": "dfr7mgm", "text": "I don't know if it is happening yet but the end goal I believe is for Xceligent to be feeding that listing/property data into real capital analytics. They are both owned by dmgi along with a lot of other CRE based data collection companies. Something to keep an eye on.", "replies": [{"id": "dfr95v8", "text": "Interesting. But why would dmgi work with RCA? Shouldnt they just buy them?", "replies": [{"id": "dfra0dq", "text": "It may be heading down that road, but currently\ndmgi are just investors in RCA.", "replies": [], "depth": 8}], "depth": 7}], "depth": 6}, {"id": "dfrs538", "text": "How do they output the data with RCA? Do they have an API or something that I would connect to, or is it going to just be excel/csv/txt dumps? I requested more information just now, so I'm sure I can ask them that.\n\nThe reason I ask, is I'm not so sure the idea of combining all this data together is going to be as hard as you may think. I am proficient in Tableau, and with that you can easily combine multiple data sources and data models, automate the retrieval, and have it all come together in a dashboard. \n\nIf I can get this data out of RCA in a way that is easily consumable, then I can do some testing in Tableau to see if it's possible to blend in financial modeling. ", "replies": [{"id": "dfse6z9", "text": "Tableau sounds awesome. With regards to RCA, its a combination of data mining, data sources (they list various data partners that they work with on their website and manual labor (people checking for accuracy, I've seen job listings for these positions for RCA). I saw one guys linkedin page that said \"designed 7000 web scraping algorithms for RCA\". Hope that gives you some insight. ", "replies": [], "depth": 7}], "depth": 6}], "depth": 5}, {"id": "dfse1k2", "text": "Also, now that I am using Argus more, the basics are pretty simple but you can customize it to make it as complicated as you want it to be. For example, you can change expenses ($ amount, $ PSF, $ as % of EGR) per YEAR, you can have 2 or 3 basic market leasing assumptions or one for each tenant, you can adjust reimbursable expenses by tenant and by year (net, NNN or gross or modified gross),  you can change lease up times and/or break up large contiguous spaces into smaller spaces or leave them as they are. So if you are doing a quick and dirty analysis, it can take 2 to 3 hours to complete. If you are thinking like an apprasier, which unfortunately, my super anal mind IS at the moment, it can take a week of constant laborious effort and markest researching to complete. If youre looking to do a basic pro forma, excel is fine. If youre looking to produce a super detailed pro forma for a particular client or manager, you gotta go with Argus. ", "replies": [], "depth": 5}], "depth": 4}, {"id": "dfzbx1e", "text": "Not to mention many properties only provide Argus, if you don't have it then it would be tricky to evaluate them...", "replies": [{"id": "dfzfe0g", "text": "Good point. We have received argus files many times from clients and its up to us to extract the info out of the file.", "replies": [{"id": "dfzvzqm", "text": "The labor and potential for that in itself might justify the expense of Argus (depending on how often you run into it)", "replies": [], "depth": 6}], "depth": 5}], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dfrb78g", "text": "Propertymetrics.com has financual modeling capability and its cheaper than ARGUS but not complete yet. More user friendly as well. STDB on CCIM is solid and has all the demo data you will ever need. ", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dfrm7hm", "text": "AssessRE is a newer, web-based replacement for Argus. It only does Office and Retail today, but it is much more user-friendly than Argus, and much less expensive.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dfrt4s6", "text": "For property data:\n\nNCREIF\n\nCoStar\n\nRCA\n\nAxiometrics\n\nPMA (Europe)\n\n\nFor Demographics:\n\nMoody's\n\nEsri\n\n\nFor Reit data:\n\nGreen Street\n", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dfs22nk", "text": "Another question..\n\nIs it possible to find data on tenants? Like a commercial real estate tenant directory? Something like this maybe? http://www.crittendenonline.com/real-estate/crittendens-retail-space/ ", "replies": [{"id": "dfsp7db", "text": "We use CreditIntel for retail tenant data.\n\nIf they are large enough office tenants we get data on them from Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters.\n\nAlso if you just wanted to know every location of a specific tenant, costar allows you to search by tenant.", "replies": [], "depth": 2}, {"id": "dftjnxu", "text": "https://www.xceligent.com/products/xceligent-cdx/ - scroll down to the tenant data section. If they are in your area, worth your time to at least get an education from the source on what they provide so you know what options are available in your market. ", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "dhyvjpc", "text": "Hey man, your cheaper alternative prayers may have been answered. A beast of an excel model that mimics argus, for free.\n\nhttps://www.adventuresincre.com/all-in-one-underwriting-model-for-real-estate-development-and-acquisition/", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]