Cap Orbit vs Archer: Full Lifecycle vs Multifamily Screening

Credit where due

Where Archer wins: multifamily screening tempo.

Archer parses a rent roll or T-12 inside the product in under a minute, and from an address alone it reaches a populated multifamily underwrite in about fifteen minutes, drawing on more than 150,000 comparable properties. It also generates a Lease Trade-Out report on rent roll upload and reads period-over-period variance in its T12 Comparison. For a team screening dozens of multifamily deals a month against comps, that tempo is real, built on a comp database that is genuinely Archer’s.

• Address to populated multifamily underwrite in about fifteen minutes
• Comps drawn from more than 150,000 properties
• Unlimited users on every plan

The rest of the deal

Multifamily screening is one lane. The deal runs longer.

Archer’s deep underwriting is multifamily. The Starter+ model is a multifamily template, the specialized modules (affordable housing, rent-regulated properties, renovation tagging, student housing) are multifamily sub-types, and the other property types it added in 2022 are scoped to market research. Cap Orbit carries a purpose-built institutional model for the asset class and lifecycle in front of you: office, retail, industrial, hotel, medical office, life science, self-storage, data center, and more, for acquisition, ground-up development, or merchant build. When no model fits the deal, it says so and stops rather than forcing a template.

After the model, the two products part ways for good. Archer’s Starter+ produces a one-page output tab formatted for investment committee memos; nothing in their public materials describes drafting the memo itself. Cap Orbit writes it, in three voices matched to the seat: a screening note that decides fast, an IC memo that argues the equity case from the returns down, and a credit memo written for the lender, downside first. Show it the memos the firm has already filed and it learns the format and voice and drafts in it, with every figure read from the model’s computed cells so the memo and the workbook never drift apart.

Past the approval, Archer tracks the deal as pipeline stages from screening to close, and as of mid-2026 its public materials document no closing deliverables and name asset management only as a module, without describing what it does. Cap Orbit abstracts the executed agreement and the lender’s conditions to funding, reconciles the settlement statement against the contract, the loan, and the underwrite, writes the basis the deal actually closed at back into the model, then carries the hold on an append-only record: budget against actuals against the original underwrite, period by period, with covenant standing read from the loan documents.

The data question

Your documents, or their comps.

Cap Orbit treats the deal the way the team already does: as a folder. Drop any document in any format onto the deal, exactly like a real deal folder, and it reads it: the broker materials, the lender’s PDF, the scanned exhibit, the workbook with the rent roll buried in a tab. It pulls the rent roll out of whatever arrived, traces every figure to the file, sheet, and row it came from, and foots the extract to the totals the document itself states. It normalizes the T-12 onto a standard expense set with an NOI bridge so every deal reads on the same lines, proposes assumptions one driver at a time, and writes nothing until the analyst accepts.

There is no third-party data subscription behind that. Archer brings market data of its own: comps from more than 150,000 properties, address-level NOI estimates, a private data cloud of the firm’s own parsed deals. If your screening conviction is built on comp coverage, weigh that. Cap Orbit’s position is that the numbers a committee approves come from the deal’s own documents, with every figure shown its source, and that is the side of the team it works.

The choice

Volume to Archer, execution to Cap Orbit.

If the team screens multifamily at volume, sizing fast against comps and passing on most of what it sees, that is the lane Archer was built for, and brokers and lenders sizing loans sit inside it.

If the firm underwrites across asset classes, answers to a committee, closes what it approves, and holds what it closes, the work runs past what a screening product carries. Cap Orbit takes the deal from the first look through the model, the memo, the wire, and the reporting periods after it, and the work product is real: it builds and revises the Excel workbook, drafts and updates the Word memo in the firm’s format, assembles the deck and the bound, bookmarked PDF, and writes it all back into the deal file, with the analyst owning every consequential decision. One instruction can read the documents on the deal, normalize the statement, build the model, and stage the memo, the analyst approving each consequential step: the difference between asking questions of a file and getting back the workbook, memo, and record.