AI-driven underwriting
AI does the underwriting. You verify and edit every number.
Drop in a rent roll, a T12, or an Argus report pack and Pencil’s AI builds the model. Then every input and every output is a structured line item you can see, question, and change, by hand or alongside the AI. Nine asset classes, acquisition and ground-up, each with the conventions that class is actually underwritten on. No black box, no hidden cells.
14 days free. No card. Your deals export anytime.
Coverage
Nine asset classes. Nine sets of conventions.
Most tools give you one model and change the labels. A hotel is not an apartment building with different words on it. Pencil underwrites each class the way that class is actually underwritten, and every one of these is a real engine, not a template.
Unit-level rent roll, loss to lease, renovation programs with per-phase capex and post-reno rents, affordable set-asides.
Lease by lease with recoveries, market leasing assumptions, rollover and downtime. Import an Argus report pack and rebuild the model from it.
The USALI cascade: occupancy and ADR to RevPAR, departmental profit by department, GOP, the two-part management fee, and the FF&E reserve where it belongs, below EBITDA.
Unit mix by size and climate tier, other income per lease event rather than per month, and the in-place to stabilized vacancy glide.
Horizontal lot work priced per lot and vertical homes priced per home, on their own schedules, plus the lease-up property-tax phase-in.
Capacity in kW instead of square feet, rents per kW per month, and the full pass-through expense structure colocation leases carry.
Leased fee, fee simple and leasehold valued side by side, with escalations, reversion, and the acquisition case on the leased-fee position.
Monthly draw schedule, capitalized construction interest, lease-up funding order, permanent takeout, and residual land value solved to a target spread.
Roll deals into one vehicle: DCF, direct cap and replacement cost side by side, weighted debt terms, and the minimum DSCR across the whole hold.
Intake
Drop in the file. The AI reads it.
Rent rolls and operating statements arrive in hundreds of formats: Excel, CSV, scanned PDF, two-row headers, charge codes, subtotal traps. Pencil’s AI reads them all into clean, structured rows and keeps every original line beside them as an audit trail you can check. It remembers how your shop maps each GL account, so the next statement classifies itself. Commercial rent rolls, rehab trackers, rentable-item directories and Argus report packs come in the same door.
Engine
Every number, visible and editable.
Nothing hides in a cell reference. Every input and output is a first-class line item in a live dependency graph, 124 of them in a standard deal. Change market rent, by hand or by asking the AI, and the recompute flows through vacancy, EGI, NOI, debt service, and IRR in order. Purple means editable, everywhere. And because Pencil exposes the whole model over MCP, you can drive it from your own AI assistant, not just ours.
Depth
The parts most tools leave to a side spreadsheet.
Promote structures, construction draws and risk analysis are where underwriting stops being arithmetic. They live in the model here, so they recompute with everything else.
Any number of tiers on IRR or equity-multiple hurdles, GP catch-up, co-investment, multiple LP classes, and the fee stack that actually gets charged: acquisition, asset management, disposition, financing. At-close fees raise the hurdle basis, annual fees reduce distributable cash, and the LP gross-to-net bridge shows what the fees cost.
A budget with per-line draw curves, capitalized interest solved as a fixed point, lease-up income applied to carry, a permanent takeout sized to market or to payoff, and residual land value bisected to a target development spread. That last one prices the land for you.
Run thousands of trials across rent growth, exit cap, hard cost, absorption and schedule, with rent and cap correlated the way they move in life. You get a distribution, a probability of loss, and a tornado chart showing which assumption is actually driving the outcome.
Multiple tranches with real lifecycles, interest-only rolling into amortization, sequential refinancings, four day-count conventions, variable-rate forward curves, and assumed loans that pay their original contractual payment. Lender yield, balloon, average life and duration are all reported.
Built by an underwriter
Written by someone who has to live with the numbers.
Pencil is built by a capital markets broker who underwrites and closes commercial real estate for a living, and it is built and tested on hundreds of institutional-quality models. Every convention in here came from a deal, not from a feature list: the reserve that belongs below EBITDA, the concession that is a function of length of stay, the horizontal costs that get quoted per lot, the promote that has to survive a partner reading it line by line.
That is also why nothing hides. An underwriter who has been handed a model they cannot open does not build one of those.
What you are replacing
The tools you pay for were priced when this was hard.
Reading a scanned rent roll used to be the expensive part. It is not the expensive part anymore. Here is what that means for the two line items on your software budget.
redIQ, now Radix Underwriting
Our closest comparison, and the gap is the whole pitch. It reads a rent roll and a T12, standardizes them, and that is where it stops. Pencil reads the same files and keeps going: lease-level cash flows, debt that behaves like debt, waterfalls and sponsor fees, Monte Carlo, development budgets with draw curves, and nine asset classes rather than multifamily alone. Same intake. A fraction of the model.
Argus Enterprise
A near-monopoly since the 2000s, and two decades without competition shows. Desktop-shaped, licensed per seat, and the model file is a box your own portfolio questions cannot reach. Pencil does the lease-level work in a browser and exports a workbook that recalculates in plain Excel with no add-in. It also imports an Argus report pack, so you can run the two side by side and check us. Please do.
What we will not pretend to replace
Radix's other business is market data, and CoStar sells more of it. We do not sell data and we are not going to claim otherwise, because the moment we did you would stop believing the rest of this page. Keep the subscription that buys you comps. Stop paying for the one that buys you arithmetic.
Distribution
Send a model, not a PDF.
Share a link and the other side gets your live underwriting, no account required. They can change your assumptions in their browser and watch the returns move, which is the one thing a printed offering memorandum can never do. Your copy is untouched and you are not notified of their edits. If they want to keep their version, they save it into their own account and it becomes their deal, frozen at the numbers you sent. You choose which tabs the link can even show. And you see which assumptions your buyers pushed on, across every recipient, which is something a file emailed into a data room can never tell you.
Output
The workbook your committee can interrogate.
One click exports a branded seven-sheet model: Cover, Pro Forma, Assumptions, Debt, Rent Roll, Historicals, Returns. Every operating line is a real formula. IRR computes natively. Because the export is built from the same graph you underwrote in, your committee can trace any number back to its source, and change an exit cap or a growth rate in Excel to watch the whole model recalculate. When a lender or partner insists on their own template, Pencil can fill that workbook instead, to the dollar.
Teams
One workspace for the whole shop.
Everyone on the team works the same pipeline, on a board or a list. Invite by link, assign roles.
Classify a line item once and Pencil maps it the same way on every future statement.
Reproduce your shop's exact operating statement layout: names, groupings, subtotals.
Blend deals into one vehicle, with a single promote over the combined cash flow rather than the sum of each deal's.
Underwrite the next deal with AI you can check.
Full access for 14 days, including a seeded demo deal you can break.