FAQ
How should a CRE team use this article?
Use it as a checklist for the questions to ask during underwriting, not as a substitute for source-backed deal review. The final model still needs document citations, market checks, review states, and clear assumption ownership.
Where does Cactus fit in this workflow?
Cactus reads deal-room materials, checks assumptions against market context, surfaces conflicts, lets users approve the facts that drive the model, and preserves the logic as Proprietary Memory for the next deal.
Why Cactus talks about Early Access, review controls, source-backed underwriting, and building with serious CRE teams instead of selling unfinished hype.
The old Early Access language was meant to communicate honesty. We were building with customers, listening closely, and improving fast. That instinct was right. The wording was not precise enough for where Cactus is now.
Cactus today should be understood as a source-backed underwriting workspace for CRE teams. Financial Analysis and Market Intelligence support live underwriting workflows. The Vault and Cactus Agents are Early Access products where review controls, approval gates, customer data privacy, and workflow fit matter more than launch theater.
What Early Access means
- The workflow is being shaped with teams that underwrite real multifamily and self-storage deals.
- The product is judged on real inputs: OMs, rent rolls, T-12s, leases, PDFs, spreadsheets, customer templates, and market context.
- New capabilities are evaluated through source trails, review states, approval gates, and output quality, not vague AI demos.
- Customer data stays private to that customer and is not used to train foundation models.
What it does not mean
Early Access does not mean Cactus is trying to replace judgment with unreviewed automation. It does not mean every connector, asset class, or agent workflow is broadly available. It means the product is being built carefully around the actual risk of CRE work: a bad number with no visible reason behind it.
The standard
The standard is simple. If a number reaches IC, a lender, a client, or a partner, the team should know where it came from, what market evidence supports or challenges it, who approved it, and whether the logic should be reused on the next deal.
How Cactus turns this into defensible underwriting
The workflow matters because the model is only one artifact. Cactus connects the deal package, market evidence, reviewer decisions, Excel outputs, templates, and Proprietary Memory so the work survives handoffs instead of disappearing into a one-off spreadsheet or chat thread.
- Extract relevant facts from OMs, rent rolls, T-12s, leases, PDFs, spreadsheets, and customer templates.
- Check rents, expenses, growth targets, cap rates, sales comps, and site context against market intelligence from premium data providers, public records, and firm history.
- Surface conflicts, confidence states, reviewer comments, and assumption overrides before the model becomes the memo.
- Populate Excel or Cactus models, then store approved facts, templates, comps, and decisions in Proprietary Memory for the next deal.
The point is not to make the model less sophisticated. The point is to make the source, market check, assumption owner, review state, and output path visible before the number reaches a partner, lender, client, or investment committee.
Defensible underwriting
Defend every number before it reaches IC.
Cactus gives CRE teams ARGUS-grade underwriting intelligence with document extraction, market checks, source trails, reviewable assumptions, Excel-ready outputs, and Proprietary Memory around the workflow.
- Rent rolls, T-12s, OMs, comps, and assumptions live in separate files.
- Market evidence gets copied into the model without a durable source trail.
- Reviewer decisions disappear after the memo, email thread, or spreadsheet version changes.
- Extract deal facts from OMs, rent rolls, T-12s, leases, PDFs, spreadsheets, and customer templates.
- Check rents, expenses, growth targets, sales comps, and other assumptions against market intelligence.
- Populate Excel or Cactus models and preserve approved logic as Proprietary Memory.
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