Thank you. That was a really great pronunciation of my last name. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us, both in person and online. It is so great to see a packed room, and I think we have doubled the numbers online as well. It is also great to see a lot of familiar faces. We are so appreciative of your continued interest in the company and your ongoing support. For those of you who have followed us over the years, you know we have been a company in transformation. We have been building, changing, and we are not done. We are going to continue to do that. Today is really about turning the page onto a new chapter. Our theme, Built for Performance, sort of speaks to that. It speaks to the operating foundation we have poured to improve our operating and financial results.
It also speaks to our client mission, which is to power their performance. Today's sessions have really been structured under two core sections. First, we'll start off with Mike, who will take us through today's announcements, as well as the strategic focus. We'll do a client-customer fireside chat, and we'll have the team come and actually do a show and tell on the product roadmap. We'll be then briefing for about 20 minutes at 9:50, and we'll come back with the financial overview section, where we'll be discussing our new financial metrics and our capital allocation disclosures. That will be followed by a 40-minute Q&A session. If you could just please wait to ask your questions then. We'll take them both from the room as well as online. We'll have Mike back on for some closing remarks.
I'm joined today by my fellow presenters with really great representation across the business. You guys always remind me it's about the people, and I couldn't be more proud to share the stage with many of my colleagues. Oh, I think, yes, before I officially kick it off, I do need to remind you that today's presentation will include some forward-looking statements. Those forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. I would also like to remind you that we use certain non-GAAP, non-IFRS measures. We have a lot of those detailed in our appendix, as well as on this disclaimer slide, which I would just ask you to read at your leisure instead of reading it out.
I would also just like to point out that today's growth rates and whatnot will be presented on a constant currency basis, and we'll be talking in Canadian dollar currency. With that, I'll now turn it over to our incoming CEO and Executive Chair, Mike Gordon, to officially kick off our 2025 Investor Day.
Thank you. Doing great. Doing great. Thank you. Thank you. Doing great. First off, I guess I should say it's good to be back and good to see a lot of friendly faces who have lots of questions. The good news about Camilla and the communications, other than that last slide we showed, which shows you that we are a technology company because you can't read it, is the fact that she got everything out at 7:00 A.M. this morning has made my job a lot easier. We have put a number of announcements out this morning. Just excited to be here. It's a lot to be doing this work over the last two weeks. I got to talk to a lot of you guys. You had a lot of questions, obviously. I said, just give us a couple of weeks.
Everybody said, well, what can you get done in a couple of weeks? This team can move mountains in a couple of weeks. When we get ourselves focused on what we'll be showing you today, we feel really good about where we're going. You're not going to hear anything about the market. I may regret saying this. I care about the market, but we're not defined by the market. As a software data and analytics company that has some of the best advisors in the business, we make our own way. While there have been headwinds in the market, and that has happened over the last couple of years, we don't define ourselves by that. You shouldn't define us by that either. I've talked about pace. Hopefully, you're going to see pace. We're accelerating that pace and making sure that we get that through.
One of the things you're going to start to see from us today is that we're going to simplify things. The business, I love our business, and I love all parts of our business. There is a point where we have to start simplifying who we are, what we are, and what we do. We are going to be going through that. You're going to see new transparency from us. With transparency, I had a talk earlier, the truth sets you free. The point being is you should see what all parts of our business are. We love all of the parts of the business that are going to be focused on how this works together with our software and our expertise. There is going to be new focus. We need to focus on what we're doing.
It's not that we can't operate, but we have had distractions and impediments that have led us to not focus as much as what we need to do. If we focus on the value that we derive to our customers, this team can do anything. We are going to measure that, and we are going to operate that way. There are going to be some times there are going to be good moments, and there are going to be bad moments. Hopefully, more good than bad. The fact of the matter is when we do operate and we talk about these things, and it becomes part of our culture, and it becomes ingrained, then it is just continuing all the way down the road.
This is what some of the greatest software companies do, you just sit back, and you keep measuring, and you keep measuring, and then you talk to the customer about the value you're driving them. If we do that, this team will be extremely strong. Let me just get to what we talked about earlier today. I was told that it would take a moment to put this up there. It is up there, so we're good. First off, you're going to see our roadmaps today. You're going to see actually some customers, thank you, guys, thank you, talking about what we're doing for them. What we are explaining today is real. This is not any kind of MVP stuff. This is not any of this stuff.
This is stuff that we have out in the market that we're talking to customers about and why we feel so confident about the organic assets we have. Do we need anything else? We're good right now. I'll come back to that in a second. You're going to get a good sense on this. We're also going to get focused on who we are. We put out a note today that we're divesting Appraisals and Development Advisory. These are good people who deserve a home where they're going to get focused on. They can get focused on their places. We can get focused on ours. I would say one thing right already, just to continue on the pace. We already have a signed LOI for our appraisals unit. Terry would kill me if I didn't say there's no guarantee that it'll close. It will close.
That's what I think. The difference between a CLO and a CEO is that I always think I have to look at that, and she looks for all the reasons why something doesn't happen. I've been practicing that all evening. It'll close, and we have an exclusive over the next 45 days to get this done. We need to act on this. They were a great part of our business for a long period of time. It's time to move, and it's time to really focus on where our future is. We will be doing work with the development advisory teams, and we'll find them new homes. It's a little bit longer, but hopefully within the first half of next year because we've already started some discussions. Operating expenses.
If anybody likes the corporate line, you can talk to me offline and why we should not keep it, but we are going to get rid of that. Now, how fast we get rid of that is a question because we have got everything, and Pawan has been working on this over the last year or so. There is a lot of work that he has done. We need to get rid of that. When I talk about ourselves becoming a Rule 40 company a couple of lines down, it is as a company. It is not as an operating unit. There is no point to what we talked about in the past. In the past, we were probably the smallest holding company that there was for all these collection of assets. We are not that anymore.
From that standpoint, we're going to be focusing on our operating expenses, and we're going to get there quickly. By 2027, when I say we're a Rule 40 company, we are a Rule 40 company. All right? Now, you're going to ask me how fast is our growth. We're going to get our growth up. Those of you who know me know I like double-digit growth. There are parts of us that are growing double digits, and there are parts that are not. We will figure out every unit that we have either is going to get us very good profitability, over 35% EBITDA. I want that growth to be as close to 10%. Maybe I just said Rule 45 company, but I'm going to hold it down at Rule 40 right now. Pawan's going to go through a lot of the metrics we're using.
I know it's an alphabet soup, but you know them all. ARR, gross retention, net retention. There's going to be more. I don't want to take that away from him, but these are things that we have to measure. We feel pretty good about those things. They're all in your handout as it is, so you guys can go ahead and look forward on that. Finally, or the final two points, we are going to do a stock buyback of about CAD 500,000,000. For the last year, since we exited tax, we've been sitting on a bunch of cash. There's no point for us to be a bank for you guys as investors. All right? We have looked through this. Next week, we're going to kick off our SIB. We have looked at the price.
You should expect something in the CAD 50-CAD57 range that we'll be doing some of this stuff at. That is coming out there. The board's voted on it. They're very excited about that. It does not mean, so people have asked me, are you getting rid of acquisitions? It is not like what we're looking at right now. The reason why, going back to what I said when I opened on this, we have what we need. We feel good about what we have. Our products, our solutions, we think are second to none. Finally, last point is that we will pursue a U.S. stock listing in 2027. Some of you will say, why are you not doing it in 2026? We want the organization to be in the right state when we go do that. What I mean by that is we are simplifying it. Okay?
There are things that are core. There are things that are non-core. The non-core things we're going to get out in 2026. There's no point in trying to move that over to try to explain ourselves on another market when we don't have our stuff where we need it to be. 2027, it's going to happen. We've been talking about this for too damn long. These are the announcements that we have today. This is what we're excited about as a board. From that point of view, that's where we'll stick. I now have to get you set up for what we're talking about next, which is really our product sets. When we talk about things, you've heard us talk about intelligence and what we're trying to do with that.
We have the greatest software that does all the valuations that everybody uses that we want everybody putting their assets on. Our asset-based pricing is starting to get there. I had a discussion with one of our customers who used seat-based pricing up to a couple of days ago. Basically, they could not understand, wait a second, I can put all my assets on this, and you are not going to charge me for this in a weird way? The answer is, get your assets on. That is where your number is based off the price point. If you go above that, we grow with you. They are like, that seems kind of refreshing. That is what we do as software companies. Now, do I want to make more money? Do I want to raise prices? Sure. Sorry for those guys out there listening in.
I want to win with my customers. Our team wants to win with our customers. When you look at this, you're bringing ARGUS together, and then we have the greatest set of advisors in this space. Rick Kalvoda has built a team that is the trusted advisor to everybody. Anybody using our folks, they tell me all the time that these guys walk on water. Rick's not going to do that for you today. The point being is they're using our software. They're seeing the value from it. They're using the AI and the analytics that we're building. All right? We want to make sure that we get that all out there. Their advice is going to be huge. I sat back and talked to our teams about who are you talking to.
Some of them are like, they're advising the C levels at some of these places, and the funds are doing really well. We need to get that with our software working together. This is where we get very simply to ARGUS Intelligence. It is basically what we look at as the platform for performance. All right? Everybody should be using this. It should be ubiquitous, and that's what we want to make it in the market. People would think back that, you know, isn't ARGUS Enterprise ubiquitous? It is. It's been on the cloud, and now we need to leverage what we're doing on the cloud. We need to leverage all the information we can give to people. We need to give them the insights that they need about their assets.
As far as I'm concerned, when I say that I don't really care about the market, it's weird for a CEO or Chair to say that. We should be doing well when the market's up, when the market is embroiled, when the market's all over the place. The reason being is we're trying to give our customers the best set of information so that they can make the best decisions on the assets that they have. They have to make decisions no matter what the market is. Yes, if the market's down, will they actually do things a little less often? Probably. If we give them the information that they need, we can help them through those times in a faster manner. That's what we're trying to do with that.
That's what you'll hear with some of the discussions that are going to be coming up from some of them and how they're using our tools today. Very excited about that. Strategically, it's very simple from a manner of what we look at. We've automated the workflows. Makes life a lot easier when you automate the workflows. We'll talk again about everybody talks about analytics and AI. It's real. It's in there. I always think about AI, and everybody talks about agentic AI. Agentic AI is great. Don't get me wrong. It is great. You can save a lot of efficiencies with that and make that happen. It's also the decisioning part of AI and analytics that's so important that gives you the effectiveness.
Those two things working in coordination is what we think is our secret sauce that will actually connect data on our platform and be able to have people use that data more holistically and being able to make a better set of decisions. By doing this, we continue to make our model smarter. We continue to make our customers smarter. They get more value from things. We keep adding properties on. We feel pretty good about where we stand and what we can deliver as part of our vision around this. Finally, as these guys try to get me out of here because I know there is somebody here that I like really a lot that will give me this when I have gone too long. If you remember anything from where I open up today, I always talk about the legs of a stool.
You have one, it's really not a really good stool. You have a couple, you know, lean against the wall. You get three, even better, but I've watched my kids knock that over. At four, you're doing really well. Software, data, analytics. I'll have to use the term AI, even though I'm an old analytics guy. Unsurpassed expertise. Those four things together is what we bring to our customers. When we bring that to our customers, I feel like we can drive a ton of value. My team, and you guys heard me on the call say we're talking about quantitative value propositions. We are going to start doing that in 2026 to say how much we're saving our customers and why we're so good at what we do. This team is excellent at what we do. My job is very simple as a Chair and a CEO.
I just have to get all the crap out of their way, and this team can do a great job. As far as I told the team when I got at my town hall in New York City, it was very simple. My job is to take the impediments out of the way. If you see anything that I am going to do, that is how I think you should value me is at the end of the day, I have to make it easy for them to do their job. With that, with not being an impediment, I am going to invite Rich Sarkis and his friends up here to talk about how our customers are using the software and how they are using things. Thanks for having me back.
Thank you, Mike, and thank you all, the folks, for being here.
Let me also start by thanking Joe and Chris. Chris has come from all the way in Australia, so over a day to get here. It really means a lot. Joe came from Boston, not as far, but we also want to thank him. Before we get going with our discussion, I thought it might be good for you guys to introduce yourselves to get a little bit of context about what they're about to hear.
Absolutely. Thanks, Rich. My name's Joe Crescio. I have been in the commercial real estate valuation industry my entire career. I came from the principal side and was at EY on the real estate advisory side for a bit. I'm licensed in a bunch of states, have my MAI valuation backgrounds. Keeps things interesting for sure. Recently, I've joined Manulife. Manulife's going through a bit of a transition, going from within the real estate area, a traditionally insurance company, to more of an investment management focus, super focused on taking on more risk across the different parts of the capital stack, driving data analytics, and really differentiating ourselves as we look to grow more of our third-party investment management business. My relationship with Altus, when I was hired from EY, my task was building out a best-in-class valuation function. Historically, we had a mediocre one, I would say.
It worked. There were two legs of that. There was not just getting credible valuations for the NAV, for consistency, et cetera, but also to do more with the data in terms of forward-looking insights, which historically, as an industry, we haven't really done the best.
Great. Chris?
Thanks, Rich, and thanks for having me. I actually started my career for the first 10 years just doing a lot of financial modeling. I taught postgraduate students in financial modeling and spent a lot of time doing derivatives, property-backed listed securities. I worked for an entrepreneurial company for those 10 years where there was really anything goes. I was that guy that built all the models and prepared all the public offer documents. Just prior to the GFC, I then moved into sort of direct property where I was responsible for asset management, third-party capitals, and capital transactions. For the last 10 years, I've been the Managing Director for CBRE Investment Management in Australia and New Zealand. In that role, we provide a full funds management service to our clients, our global clients investing into Australia.
We do everything from acquisition through to disposal, so all asset management, debt arrangement, trust management. It is quite a good role.
Chris, staying with you, you're at CBRE, as you mentioned earlier. CBRE has a global enterprise-wide agreement with us. They use all of our software. They're VMS users as well. Your journey into the ARGUS Intelligence family, so to speak, is a bit of a different one. It came by the acquisition of a company we made a few years ago called Forbury, which provides the Excel interface into ARGUS. Can you speak a little bit about how that came to be?
Yeah, absolutely. With my background in financial modeling, the issue that we have when investing in property securities is it's generally got to generate 10 years of monthly cash flows. To do that within the Excel environment is very difficult. It makes really large models. What we do in the past is use, say, ARGUS Enterprise or another similar program, run the cash flows in there, bring them into Excel, then wrap around the debt, fees, trust expenses, and so on for us to get the equity returns, providing the numbers for our clients. When I saw the Forbury product, it was a game changer, a quantum leap for us. Being able to then just use the Excel environment to do all of those cash flows and forecasting and build around that within the native environment, it was a quantum leap for us.
I've managed to cut our underwriting and reporting from it used to take us weeks, quite honestly, down to about an hour. We can very quickly get to the source and get those numbers quickly to our clients.
All right. We like to say we meet our customers where they are. Obviously, everyone in this room online, you know and are familiar and are users with Excel. I think one of those things that this brings is sort of eliminates the barrier to adoption.
Absolutely. Yeah. With all due respect to ARGUS Enterprise, it's not a very well-used product in the Australian market and APAC in particular, but Excel is everywhere. Everyone's familiar with it. Very low barrier to entry. A great example is I had an analyst from Singapore come down to seconded to my office. I had a really important market rent review for a major tenant. I asked him to do some analysis on what my bookends were. It was a 10-year deal with a market rent review in year five. In year five, my two options were hit them with the market rent review and assume that they're going to vacate and lease, or I cut a deal with them, lower market rent, and we get a 10-year lease. I asked him to do what those bookends were. He had no idea.
After 30 minutes of showing him in the Excel interface, he was able to turn that around in a day and come back with the correct result. I think that really shows the power of that Excel interface, the familiarity of someone that can do the modeling. Yeah, to be able to use it that quickly and that accurately was really powerful. Yeah. Just to build off that a little bit more, that's always been the criticism of the ARGUS software. It's like you can download things out of ARGUS to Excel, but then the ability to build custom dashboards and actually push that and run the calculations, have that be seamlessly and connected, that's a pain point. I think unlocking that is going to create a lot of immediate steps to drive more efficient reporting, aggregation of data, et cetera. It can be done now, but it's a little bit inefficient.
That's great. I think that's a great segue. You heard Mike talk about the convergence onto ARGUS Intelligence that includes ARGUS Enterprise, it includes Forbury, the Excel interface. The team's about to demo ARGUS Intelligence for all new here and online. I know you've been very familiar with it over the last sort of 12 to 18 months.
Can you explain the value of measuring performance both through Portfolio Manager and Benchmark Manager to the folks in the room?
Yeah, absolutely. There is the Asset Manager, Portfolio Manager, and then Benchmark Manager. I kind of look at those. There is value across each of those, but most importantly is the benchmark manager. We have a lot of the asset management and portfolio management data now, but really how do you compare that to benchmark and not just the headline number, but it is drilling down into the various different attributions, yield versus cash flow impact, and then within the cash flow impact, even going deeper within sub-markets, et cetera. We are able to take the performance headline number, which we have had for a while, income versus capital, and then actually drive into what the attribution is and then get as granular as we can on the asset individual level. There is a lot of value there. I think the deeper we go, the more value is there.
I know you got to kind of start at the MSA level with broader levels, and there's a push to bring that even drill down. That's where I think where you can really get a true comparable set of data where this becomes pretty powerful.
Yeah. We were chatting backstage. You also made the point of how you use the tool or can use the tool to assess your asset manager's performance sort of almost at the compensation level.
Yeah. Look, I think across everyone needs to know their scorecard they're measured to. I think the more objective data you can build into a process that's fair, no data point is the end-all, be-all, but it starts to drive a conversation. Even in a down market, if you have an asset, maybe you're an asset manager, you're dealt a bad hand, but it's more of a stop-loss type thing you're doing. It's like, okay, yeah, market rent, and the market has gone down, but you've managed to keep that up. I think that drives a conversation. It's not just the yield. Oftentimes, it gets blurried with the yield and the cash flow. If you start to then within the cash flow, be able to benchmark those things to a relevant data point at that granular level.
That's something pretty powerful and something that Altus has the unique ability to do given the amount of data that you have insights into.
Yeah. I think, Joe, that's a really good point as well. For us as an investment manager, it's important we can benchmark, obviously, against the but in terms of downtime or good times, how do we demonstrate the offer that we're delivering for our clients? Being able to clearly point that out, whether it's a sector strategy, a property strategy, whatever it is, that then helps us to raise capital in the future as well, having that clear strategy.
That's a great point. Leveraging it for your LP presentation too.
Exactly. Yeah. The LPs have a lot of resources that keep us very busy. Any tools that are going to help us get to the key points very quickly and be able to explain those to our LPs. As I said, I think before I mentioned it was a game changer. Just that efficiency for us is fantastic, really powerful.
Just to add on that a little bit, one source of truth. I always say that. One source of truth right now across various different firms I've been at, the data's all there, but people are kind of running things in different areas. If you have the, I know there's the Altus ID for each property, and then that becomes connected across these different systems. I think that is pretty powerful just for efficiency's sake. I think there's kind of short term. Once all these systems are connected and you kind of drive reporting from it, the reporting and efficiency, that's kind of the short-term thing. I think once you have all these forward-looking data points with historical data points, with benchmark data points, you blend all that together seamlessly.
All these ideas have been out there forever, but the technology is only so many hours in the day, so we're not able to always do all the analyses that we want to do. I think we're starting to see that come to fruition, or at least the foundations are the building blocks from there.
I think that's a foundationally important point because I think folks outside of commercial real estate perhaps don't realize just how hard it is to connect the data. I like to joke that when I founded my previous company, Reonomy, that was one of the seminal points of technology and IP that we developed through the Reonomy ID, which is now the Altus ID. I lost my hair doing it. That's all.
Right. Just to pull on that thread a little more, though, Joe, I think part of it is also the data interoperability so that you do not have to jump from one application to the next and take data from Excel into ARGUS and back and forth. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of having a unified solution as well?
Yeah. Having an interface, I mean, this kind of relates back to the Excel point, but everyone's familiar with Excel. I mean, people have to take ARGUS trainings to learn it. It's not the most intuitive thing, and it's kind of a badge of honor when you're the ARGUS expert. If you can have that ability in Excel, which so much of the other reporting analysis is being done and it's customized analysis, having that all in a format that's readily available and can calculate based off that interface that everyone's used to is critically important.
Yeah. I'd like to add to that as well. I think for me, it allows me to collaborate with my global colleagues. The tyranny of distance and time in Australia is that generally I can work on I need to work on a 24-hour turnaround, which is so inefficient. Being able to work on the one model, see if you're sitting in Germany, in Japan, or in the U.S. at the one time, it just, again, cuts all that friction down. As Joe was saying, in the Excel interface, it's really easily adopted by all of our teams around the globe. I can even open it up to my asset managers. Then I'm getting real live-time data and insights into the market at all times because an asset manager is typically not the wouldn't know the first thing about using an ARGUS Enterprise model.
For an Excel interface, they can easily pick it up and be trained quite easily by our analysts.
As Mike mentioned, we're moving to that asset-based pricing now.
I think we're having some interference with the mic.
Okay. All right. As Mike mentioned, you guys are on asset-based pricing. You're assuming to be, and I think that's one of the things that also facilitates that ubiquitous and eliminates the barriers to adoption from a user perspective.
Totally. Historically, before we moved to the asset-based pricing, there would always be this kind of game. We would go back and forth with how many users, are they all critical? If we reduce the amount of licenses, then that will reduce our fees. There is always this back and forth. At the end of the day, everyone on the platform should have access to these systems. I think opening that up is a really net positive direction. We do not have to, everyone has access to the data within our organization. No one is prohibited from seeing all that. From my perspective, I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Just staying with you for a moment longer, you've been on the journey of ARGUS Intelligence from the early days when we first released a beta junior team where we're playing around, giving us the feedback, good, bad, ugly. Can you tell the folks in the room and online how it's been over the last 6, 12, 18 months to sort of see the evolution of ARGUS Intelligence?
Yeah. Absolutely. I've been using ARGUS my entire career back when it was DCF 15, et cetera. There's always been this untapped potential of doing more with the data. Over the last, there's been a time where we wanted to see this happening as an industry, and it's taken a little bit longer than I think we would have liked to. The fact that when I saw the initial demo, I was like, "This is powerful. This has a lot of great potential here." Being in beta form, it's like, "Okay. We have this data. We're doing this now. It'll be interesting to see where it turns out too." Now fast forward a year or a year and a half, there's incremental changes. They've moved at a pace that's pretty profound.
It is going from something that is kind of like theoretical to maybe a nice-to-have to we should get on board here because if we are not, the rest of the industry is not going to. We do not want to be a laggard in that regard. It has profoundly moved in the right direction over the last year.
That's great to hear. Thanks, Joe. I know we're coming up on time, but we cannot have a fireside chat in 2025 without talking about AI. I will maybe end it by asking you, Chris, what are your thoughts on AI and how it should or could be applied in commercial real estate?
Thank you, Rich. Look, I'm just a simple property guy. AI, I'm not quite sure of its capabilities. One thing I do know is that you need to have solid data. Once that's there, that it's verified, it's accurate, then I say let the AI out. I think in the commercial real estate, we've been pretty slow adopters of change, but I'm really excited to see what the AI can bring to commercial real estate.
Awesome. We are at about time. I am all outstanding in between you and demos of those products that these guys were talking about. I will thank you both again, and then I will turn it over to my esteemed colleague, David Ross, to run you through the next part of the session. Thank you again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Particularly, yeah, thank you to Chris and to Joe. Obviously, my job every day is to make sure that I'm listening to our customers, understanding what is most important to them, and to deliver on that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to stand, do a little bit of framing for the smarter people in the room for me who are going to come up and show you more about what we've been doing over the last few years. To just frame that strategy, I wanted to take you back where we've been, what we have been doing, and then give you some direction about where we're going. Over the last number of years, we have completed a migration of our customers, their software, their usage onto cloud.
A big driver, a big important element of that is it allowed us to aggregate the data. There is a whole host of data that is behind what our customers do with ARGUS Enterprise, the asset information, the models that they generate, the outputs, and the performance ultimately that they understand from that. We put that into a safe, secure environment, and it also allowed us to scale the investment. We then met that with the development of a modern native cloud platform. That was intended deliberately to then return back to our users and to our customers access to the insight that we had been developing. You have heard from Chris and from Joe. You will continue to hear. What drives AI is the access to high-quality usable data. That is a lot of what we have been putting in place.
Underneath the covers within ARGUS Intelligence is a lot of learning, some of which we brought in from outside. With the acquisition of Reonomy, we've got access to new techniques and tools that allow us to aggregate and move data at pace. The knowledge graph, the development of Altus ID, and a lot of the tools that sit around that have allowed us to produce a much more capable way of interacting with the data. Where we're going from here is very much converging all of the user experiences we have into a unified experience itself. We will focus a lot on valuers today, but those are asset managers, they're portfolio managers, there's fund managers, there's appraisers, there's brokers. I could go on.
I think you heard directly from Joe and from Chris, they want to have that ability to share across all of those different parts of the life cycle. All right. We are driving towards being able to do that with a compelling user experience, but also making sure the data's being shared backward and forward. Ultimately, you're going to hear a lot about it because that's where we are. We want to be able to leverage the AI. For me, I have been working in AI for nearly 30 years. It is my bread and butter. I know what we're doing with it. It has evolved dramatically. It isn't just about generative AI and LLM. There are a lot of different ways that we can bring this to automate what we do, to guide users, to help them take the next step.
When we talked about forwarding the Excel interface, making sure you can do that in that space as much as any other experience that we deliver. To give them insight, to give them information, or give them a derived outcome from what is in the data itself that they may have taken much longer or more challenging to actually find it, and then ultimately to generate output that can be shared broadly across organizations. Whether that's a valuation model, whether it's an appraisal report, or whether it's some other aspect. With that, I'm going to invite my colleagues up, and they're going to show you a bit of what we've got.
What's key behind this is that we want to show how we're combining data and AI, collecting the right information, using that information, assembling it in the right way that we can actually produce some appropriate output. We're going to show how we augment the human with the AI. This is not about replacing or removing individuals from this. This is about supplementing our human experts with tools and capabilities that help them do their job faster and more capably, and then ultimately how that unlocks value for them, ensuring that we're empowering those users to do higher-order tasks. I think what was key from what Chris was saying, that allows them to spend more time developing their strategies, the things that actually really drive value for our customers. Cranking the handle on actually producing valuation models isn't that much fun.
If it's time-consuming, it takes you away from things that really help the business. That's where we're at today. With that, I'm going to invite Matt LaHood, who is our Head of Platform Data Analytics, alongside Lauren and Peter, to come up and give the demo and show you how we're actually bringing this to life.
Thank you, David. I just need a second to plug in here. Okay. Thanks, everybody, for taking some time to be with us. For everybody who's joining remotely, we appreciate your time and attention. What we want to do today is bring the strategy that you've been hearing about to life. It is not just about, "Let's bring the data and put a web interface on it." Let's really work with the experts. Let's work with the Chrises and the Joes. Let's work with Lauren and the broader valuation advisory team to really understand the why behind the things that they do. When we do build out the software, when we do build in the automation and the intelligence, it can have the most meaningful impact to the things that they do and the decisions that they make.
Just one housekeeping note before we get in it. For the people who are joining remotely, the demo will not be broadcasted, but you'll still see us as presenters up here on the stage. As we get into it, we can see here this is the homepage. This is a landing page. This is ARGUS Intelligence for the people who haven't seen it before. You can see here we have ARGUS Intelligence Core. This is the asset manager and ARGUS Enterprise. As the name implies, asset manager, we're really focusing at the asset level. Here, we're giving users the ability to create assets in a number of different ways. We're also bringing in new data sources as well. It's not just the modeling data. We have access to all kinds of rich data sources like the Reonomy data.
Bringing that in, surfacing that in new ways for people to use it to make better decisions. Moving on to the portfolio. Here, we'll be able to aggregate those assets in a number of different ways for people to do all kinds of different analytics and comparisons on. Here, one thing that you'll see is we're able to instantly and consistently create these portfolios and surface the information. One of the things that we hear a lot from our clients is it could take hours, even days, to do those aggregations. When they're done, a lot of times each of the portfolio managers do it a little bit differently. There's not a lot of consistency there. Here, we'll see that we can solve both of those. Finally, we have the Benchmark Manager. Here, the benchmark, super powerful tool. It's not just a list of numbers.
It's not just, "Here's your benchmark. Here's your average market rent or your contract rent for a particular sector." Here, we spend a tremendous amount of time working with the valuation advisory team, working with clients. We've actually conducted over 100 interviews and demos to really fine-tune what we have here. As you'll see, it's focused on attribution. It's really focused on how has the benchmark changed, how has my portfolio changed. As Joe was saying, what are those differences in terms of yield, in terms of cash flow, and drilling all the way down to the asset level? A lot of powerful tools here. You can see each of the different components that we have. They build on each other. They build on the rich data that we have, and they build on the expertise that we're leveraging.
If we start off with Asset Manager, here we could see I have a list of assets that I have permission to view. We can see here one is just a simple asset. It's one address, it's one property, one building. I also have the ability to create things that are a little bit more complex that might be in line with my investment. Here we have just a demo property. It's actually made up of three different buildings with three different addresses. When I click on that, what we'll see is the info so it is just demo addresses. The map just puts us over the ocean. When you have real addresses in there, it'll actually put you at your actual location. Here, one of the most powerful things behind the scenes is that Altus ID, right?
We're connecting these properties with the models from ARGUS Enterprise. You can see here, I actually have over 45, 47 models for each of these properties that I can access with just a couple of clicks.
Yeah. Let me jump in there, Matt, because I think, yeah, it's good to be aware of our clients who have been using ARGUS Enterprise for many years, so in some cases, even decades. You can imagine that over the course of time, they have been collecting dozens, hundreds of models for an individual asset. It will take them a lot of time looking at and going through that dataset to actually retrieve and find the information that is truly valuable. Imagine that you're getting a question from one of your investors, one of your LPs. We heard Chris saying the 24-hour turnaround. Being able to answer such a question to boost the confidence and the trust in your insights to your LPs is going to be critical.
Being able to actually retrieve that information in a way that it's accessible is of great value to a lot of our clients.
Yeah. That's great. We will see through some of the demo how we can access those different models and do some of those comparisons and analysis. Here, when I click on the overview, we can see that it's going behind the scenes. It's summarizing those three properties, the latest valuation models that we have for each of those three, and giving us a number of key metrics. Here, I can see we're actually doing pretty well with this asset. It's got 100% occupancy. The base rent is actually higher than the market rent. It's doing really well. I have a number of forecasts. I have my NOI forecast. I have my cash flow. I can see how the occupancy is going to play out over the years.
I have some of my modeling assumptions here and the discount rate and the cap rate, and then a summary of the cash flow. At the bottom, I can see I have each of those three properties with some of the key metrics. If there was something up top where I had questions on, I could come down here and see how that's playing out. I can simply click on one of those, and the page will refresh. Instead of being all three of those properties, it'll give me the same information just for that single one. Here is the first place where we're actually starting to introduce some of the automation. Here, if I click on the files and I launch the tenancy importer, what this does is allow me to automatically ingest my rent roll.
Up until now, the users have to actually hand-type in their rent rolls into ARGUS Enterprise. Takes a lot of time. Could be prone to errors. A lot of review has to be done because this is really valuable information. It's a key part of the models, so it has to be right. Here, what we're doing, we're leveraging AI. We're using the strength of the LLM to actually read the files that come in to understand what's in it. Once we have that understanding, we can map it to the data that we actually want to bring in. The user will confirm that, "Yes, that's the data that I want. That's the right spot." That can be set up as a template. The next time you do it, it can be automated.
Lauren, do you want to talk a little bit about how your team would take advantage of this?
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Right now, our data ingestion, as Matt mentioned and as a couple of our clients mentioned, is highly manual. It requires many layers of review, and it's definitely prone to human error. By using this automation, we'll be able to eliminate that error, streamline our processes, honestly, and be able to complete valuations faster and spend more time on high-value analysis, which is really, at the end of the day, what we want to be spending our time doing.
Great. The next piece that we want to show, once you have your rent roll ingested, the thing that you would do is spend a lot of time researching and coming up with the modeling assumptions that you're going to be using for that quarter. Here, I just have an individual model. What I'm going to do is use our valuation agent to actually come up with a set of recommendations. Here, we have spent a tremendous amount of time developing this. We have a research lab with about a dozen data scientists. They have built a whole suite of machine learning models behind this to actually come up with all of these recommendations. They have also built algorithms to figure out what comps are most relevant for this individual property and the recommendations that we're making.
That is not it. That is not the whole story. Like a lot of us who are well-versed in analytics, you know you could have the best model. You could have the most predictive model. If you are not surfacing it in the right context for the user, they are not going to take advantage of it. They are not going to use it. It is just going to sit on the shelf. We actually ran an alpha program with the valuation advisory team. That was three or four months. We did about eight iterations on the software to really fine-tune and understand the context that they need to use these recommended values so we can really streamline and impact what they are doing. We can see here highlighted in the blue, we have the recommended ranges for each of the modeling assumptions.
One of the first things that they wanted to see was, "How does that compare to my last model?" That was the model that we selected when we first did these calculations. We can see here is the model, the last model, and the delta between what is being recommended now and what they had last quarter. They also spend a tremendous amount of time in the benchmark, looking at the benchmark, doing comparisons, trying to figure out where the market is, where it is going. We have built that in side by side. We can see here for the same property type, for the CBSA, which is the same geographical region, what those benchmark numbers are. We also did the national averages as well.
Then they can really have at their fingertips a lot of information to start to hone in on what they want to do and where they want those recommendations to be. The other thing that was really valuable for them was the comparables. We have comparable sales, we have comparable leases, and then also the exit cap and the discount rate. Here, the functionality is all the same between those. I'll just click on one. We'll look at the comparable leases. Here, as I was mentioning, we have algorithms just crawling through the data, trying to find the most relevant ones to surface to the user. Here we have our subject property, and we can see some basic information on it, the building size, the year it was built, and then a lot of information on the leases.
We're surfacing 10 comparables, but it's really up for the experts to go through there and pick out the ones that are going to be most relevant for the current situation and the ones that they want to use to reference in their models. Lauren, I think you guys go through here and you take about five for the evaluations that you do.
Yeah, that's right. What we find really exciting here is that all the comparable leases, sales, key data points, and KPIs are really brought to one place. Right now, our teams can spend endless hours doing research, compiling all these data points from different sources, and manually inputting them into our own software, our own spreadsheets. Right here, all the data is right in front of us, which will allow us to complete our evaluations faster, spend time finding the right comps, the right data points, which is really great.
Yeah.
Yeah. Matt, maybe imagine we're looking at this from the perspective of doing evaluation, but imagine putting this into the hands of an acquisition or underwriting team who are working through dozens of deals each month, hundreds of deals and opportunities each year. If you would put this into the hands of that user group, they would be able to start churning those deals much faster and really spend time on more diligence to identify those deals that are making most sense and best aligned to their strategy to hit their targets. This is going to be a huge way of saving time for those kinds of teams and also help them in the end prove out better returns based on those data-driven decisions that they're able to make with these kinds of capabilities.
Yeah. So that's great. It's functionality that we build out once, but it applies to multiple personas and different points in the CRE lifecycle. That's great that it's going to be powerful for a number of different types of users. Once we've gone through that, once we've imported our data, we've gone through, we've landed on all of our modeling assumptions, we've got our models set, the next thing that we'd want to do is really aggregate those models or aggregate those assets into portfolios. Here in Portfolio Manager, we actually have a number of different ways that we can do that. I can come in and I can select from a list of assets. I can say, "These are the assets that I specifically want in that portfolio." I can write some simple rules to capture the assets that I'm interested in.
Here we could see there's a number of different ways to do that. Just to call out one specifically, if I wanted to have all of the industrial properties in New York, I could code that, and then that would dynamically update every time I clicked on that portfolio. As things were acquired or disposed of, the system would automatically know that and take that into account when I clicked on the portfolio. I'll just click on one here. Every time I click on it, it's going through, it's understanding what assets are in there, and then it's doing all of the calculations for the metrics and summarizing. I can see here I have 75 assets in this portfolio. Some of them have multiple properties in it. I'm actually up to 78 properties.
I can see that it's a very similar layout and set of information that I had when I was looking at the asset. It's actually all of the same information, right? It's the same models. It's the same summaries that I had at the asset level that I have here. I also, as before, have the list of properties, yes, the list of properties and some of their key metrics. If I saw something here and I wanted to go back, I would just click on it, and it would take me right back to Asset Manager, and I can do some further investigation. One of the most powerful things here, and to what Peter was alluding to before, having all of that history.
I could come in here and I can select my valuation from the prior period, and I can instantly get a comparison to see what has changed from the prior quarter, right? I can see here that I've increased actually six assets. Obviously, my total value is going to go up, but my value per square foot is down. That's probably something I'd want to look at and investigate. I'd be free to go through that here. Really, the power in having all of that history is I could come in and I could look at, "Okay, what's happened since the start of the year?
What's happened in the same period last year?" I can go back all the way to when this portfolio was initially set up, having all of those models in, and see since inception what has happened, all just with a couple of clicks, having that history built into the platform.
Yeah. You make it look really simple, but I think it's good to understand how difficult this is for our customers as of today. Having this data organized and structured around that asset ID, that Altus ID, is really going to drive the ability that you're showing here. When we're speaking to clients, and I think Joe was alluding to it earlier on as well, it's getting the insights out and having to pull the data in some cases into Excel. If you want to look at this from different angles, you want to look at this for all your office assets, or you want to look at all your West Coast assets in the U.S., you want to be able to build those insights really quick, and this is going to save hours.
This is really where you're going to be able to pull that data together in minutes rather than having to spend a day or so putting this back into Excel and compiling those insights.
Yeah. From an evaluation advisory standpoint, we spend countless hours pulling this data for our clients. Do they want a set of assets together, a set of portfolios together? We do not always have the time to do this, but with this product, it really does allow the data to be at their fingertips, and it can really help with us and give us an opportunity to provide additional insights for portfolio analysis. This would be very helpful.
That's great. We're already seeing some areas where you could have time savings, and then there's actually a real need from our customers to have further insights, and that all can be driven from here. The next thing we'd like to highlight is the benchmark. I click into Benchmark Manager. There is intelligence behind it. I was looking at the Connect portfolio, and the Connect portfolio is the one that comes up, so it remembers what I was doing. I'm free here to select any of the portfolios that were created, and I don't have to do anything for this. As soon as a portfolio is created and it's available in Portfolio Manager, it's also available here. There's no additional setup needed.
Just to take a quick tour through the toolbar here, I could either look at all of the data, which is the data that we have from our software side of the business in AE, plus the services side that we get from the valuation advisory. We're bringing all of that data together to have a really comprehensive set of data for our clients to analyze. Here, I could also select Core Open-End, so I could have a fund type. Here, this is something that our clients have been asking for. They want to see more fund types, something that we're considering for 2026. Really, what we're hearing across the board is they just want finer views of the data. We'll hear a little bit about that in a minute, but the fund type is one that they're really interested in.
We've also seeded this with five years of history, so I'm free to come in, and if I wanted to do a historical analysis, to click on one of those dates. Everything here is a delta. It's a difference between. I could look at the quarterly difference and annual difference or three or five year. Here, I'm just going to stick current period, quarter, and I can see that in my portfolio, I actually have 78 properties, and I'm comparing that to well over 15,000 in the benchmark. One of the other things that our clients had been asking for is to include property subtypes to really get into finer cuts. We released this in Q1. We've already built this in for them. It was by far and above the number one feature request, so we're glad to have that in there.
I can scroll down, and I can see the headline. Here, I'd be a little bit frustrated. I'm slightly under the benchmark in terms of my appreciation. I can see how that plays out in terms of the yield and the cash flow and the allocation and selection. As we heard from the Fireside Chat, we can see the detail behind that. I can see, yes, my discount rate, my cap rate are creeping up a little bit, but the benchmark has actually been pretty stable on both, so I'm slightly disadvantaged to them. I actually have a positive cash flow when they're negative. If we start to look into some of the detail here, we can see a pretty interesting story building out. I have a pretty big decrease in my occupancy.
Usually, that's coupled with the OPEX ratio going up. OPEX over revenue, my revenue is going down because I'm losing some occupancy, so those usually go hand in hand. What I'm also seeing is an increase in my contract rent. This might not be a totally bad story because it seems like I'm losing leases that are under contract, under this current contract rent, but also under market. I can see that I'm well under the market rent, and I'm under both the benchmark contract and market rent as well. As with Asset Manager and Portfolio Manager, I can simply scroll down to the bottom. Here, I can expand, and I can see either all of the yield effects or the cash flow effects for each of the individual properties.
Here, I can just simply scroll through and see if this is really the case, if that's really the story that's playing out. I see some little increases and decreases, some puts and takes, and then I get to Property 42, and there it is. There's a significant drop in occupancy coupled with a big increase in the contract rent. Those are indeed the leases that I want to be losing out and recycling. Yes, my OPEX ratio did come up. If I wanted to investigate that further, I click on the hyperlink, it opens up a new tab, it takes me back to the asset page and the overview, and then I'd be free to investigate any further here.
You already mentioned that it's a bit frustrating, right, because this portfolio is underperforming against the benchmark. There's a little more frustrating than having to go and tell your LP that you're underperforming and then not coming prepared with a plan on how you're going to remediate or what is causing that underperformance. With this in my hands, I'm able to actually quickly identify what is the cause of this. I can work with my team. I can start collaborating with my asset management, property management teams to actually build out a plan, see how that plays out. I can use the Asset Manager and Portfolio Manager capabilities to work out a couple of scenarios and then go back to my LPs and say, "I know I'm not maybe hitting the mark today, but this is my plan.
This is how I'm going to improve my performance coming next round.
Right. Really taking advantage of all the capabilities here to come up with that plan and have as big of an impact on the negative performance as you can. One other thing that I'd like to highlight is just a different way to use the Benchmark Manager. This was very much a top-down, let's see how the portfolio is performing. If I come in and I select a property type, I select a region, so it's Southern California, and I select just an individual property, now I can compare just this individual property against what else is in the market that could be used to judge my performance. Here, it's just my single model against 470 that are in the benchmark.
Before, when we were looking at comparables, we had a list of 10 to choose from, and we were trying to narrow it down to five. Here, we can actually see we have a much broader dataset to start doing some of these comparisons. Here, the story is a little bit different. I'm actually very positive on the appreciation, which is great. Again, as before, I'm a little bit challenged on the yield side, but I'm positive on the cash flow. If I look down into the details, I can see that I'm actually very stable. I haven't had hardly any changes at all in any of my metrics. This is really what we want to see. We want to see stability in our asset. We want to see positive appreciation.
If this is all I had, I might just move on to the next one and be done with my analysis here. With the five years of history that we've seeded into the benchmark, I can actually come down. I could see both the yield and the cash flow metrics and how they've played out over the last five years. There's a pretty interesting story here. My occupancy is great. It's been 100% for the last four or five years. I can see that I started out with a pretty good separation in terms of the contract rent for what is charged, what the benchmark has versus where I'm at. Over time, I've only increased pennies while the benchmark has increased dollars. The good news is that I actually have further separation in the market rent.
I'm actually able to, would be able to charge much higher, almost two and a half times where I am currently, and it's much higher for where the benchmark is today. The other thing that highlights is this linear relationship with time and the lease term. This tells me I have a single tenant, and I have about two years left on this lease. This would be a high time for me to make a plan to see, am I really going to be able to increase this lease by two and a half times? If not, two years would probably be a good time to start. Who's going to come in? How much time is it going to take?
Are there any renovations that I need to be doing in order to get my property ready to really be able to take advantage of the separation I have and the higher market rent?
Yeah. This analysis for both property and portfolio is currently offered as a service by our performance and analytics team, but it's only to a set amount of clients because it's manual and it's also delivered as a static report. Benchmark Manager will really allow our clients to dig into the data when it's available and reduce that turnaround time that there currently is, which will bring a lot more collaboration to these client meetings and offer more insights on our side, which will be helpful coming into those meetings.
Yeah, for sure. I could see a huge value in that. If I was a client and I had access to the tool and you guys were going to come in and actually use the tool to do the analysis, I could be prepared. I could have my questions ready. Just interactively during the session, we could look and we can filter and investigate anything that we would need. I could go on for hours, maybe even all day. There is a ton more in here that we just do not have time to show today. We are going to close this part of the demo. Hopefully, you have been able to see the four legs that Mike was talking about in his strategy and really coming to life in the software.
It's not just about, "Hey, let's surface the data in a new way," but let's leverage the expertise from internally, from our clients, and let's make sure that we're surfacing it in ways that it's going to be much more powerful. It's all built on our foundation. It's built on the AE Calc engine. It's built on the Altus ID. These are new foundational pieces that we're bringing to market. I'm sure you can imagine if we had a team of agents working on your behalf, interacting with these foundational pieces, we could be much more efficient and effective. That's actually what we've been working on and built, and Aditya is going to show us.
All right. Thanks, Matt. Good morning, everyone. Super excited to be here today. I'm going to show you all a piece of innovation that we've built. It's an agent that we've built that brings together, as Mike and Matt mentioned, analytics, data, expertise together in this application. We asked ourselves a question a few months ago, right? Can we build an agent that automates a ton of what our users like Ryan can do? We started on the goal of building an agent that generates a restricted appraisal report for our users and gets that in about 90% of the time that it takes today. The AI that you're going to see is built on the same trusted foundations as our ARGUS Calc engine. It's rooted in the same outcomes that Matt just described, the same numbers. They all come from our Calc engine under the hood.
Our AI encapsulates that and brings the outcomes and augments the users. To start with, this is our landing page for the agent. It is clean. It is simple. Our appraisers today build about 20,000 assets worth of restricted appraisal reports day in, day out, quarter in, quarter out. What if we could take the agent, roll forward previous quarter's valuation model, and make the report available for the next quarter with all the data from our platform, from the knowledge graph, pulling it together? Let us see that in action. Generate an appraisal report for these are the assets I have worked on in the previous quarter. Let us pick one. The agent will go do its thing. It should come back. Maybe let me refresh. Okay, I have lost the Wi-Fi. Okay.
The one thing to kill Wi-Fi and kill an agent, now you know how to kill an Agentic AI agent. If you do not connect it to the ping frame, or I'm sorry, I'm going old.
Yeah.
If you don't connect it, then you can't do anything. I'm just here to buy you time, Aditya.
Thank you.
All I meant.
Jokes. It's going to happen. It'll happen eventually.
Today.
Like right now.
All right. As you can see, the agent went back, created the appraisal report for the next quarter, and here it is. This is our landing page. This is our page of the appraisal report. We have laid it out in a pretty user-friendly fashion with help from our users, guiding and shaping the vision all along. There are different sections available. The restricted appraisal report consists of a variety of tables organized in different sections on our traditional standard printable report. We have reflected those here that go on from value conclusion, the summary of assumptions, income expense summaries, the cash flows, the input assumptions. This is where all the supporting ARGUS model schedules are available, all the way to standard stuff, boilerplate stuff like the cover page, the transmittal letter, so on and so forth.
Going back to the value conclusion, let's start with a simple prompt. One of the pain points we've heard from our users is we make changes, adjustments to discount rate, exit cap rate all the time depending on the market. What if someone could just summarize very neatly for us what happened actually in the model? That's a simple pain point that we started to focus on, and we'll look at that example now. All right. This is the prompt I gave it. I asked it to adjust the discount rate downward by about 150 bps . What the agent does under the hood is it goes in, opens up the ARGUS calculation engine that's been packaged up as an AI agent. It finds the relevant sources of data, knows where to go in and make the change to the agent.
The agent will be intuitive and will tell the user, "Hey, I've understood your ask. I'm trying to figure it out, and let me go do that now." It gives that transparency, and the user is in control over here. The agent is now going back and seeing you can see changes being reflected. It's making the changes live on the report, and it's done. The value changed. It gives the previous value with the change, the new discount rate, and gives a summary and a commentary of what it did, how it did, and so on and so forth. It also pulls in a recommendation agent that Matt was just showing and highlights, "Hey, you're doing something. This may be out of range, may not be out of range." It gives that insight and pulls together for the user.
Peter, would you like to add something here?
What I would like to point out here is if you speak to customers and you ask them, "Do you want to apply AI?" While we heard Chris saying he's a property guy, so he doesn't really know if he can trust this. I think one thing that is really relevant here is that what is sitting behind this is the same set of data, the same set of calculations, the same modeling capabilities that the industry has trusted and has been relying on for the last decades. When I hear clients saying the outcome of an AI model, 80% accuracy is not enough, we hear them saying that, and we're taking that into the way that we built this.
We're making sure that this is comparable to the way that we're delivering our services as of today through all the manual processes that we have in place to actually deliver this.
That's exactly right. All right. Moving on to a more complex prompt. As you can see here, you have got a vacant suite on this property. It's suite 15066. One of the pain points we've heard from the users, and I was in a meeting in Chicago when this happened. The client calls Lauren and, "Hey, we've got an update to this property. Someone just signed a lease. What happens to my value?" Let's try to do that. I just signed a new lease for suite 15066. New tenant is Altus Group. Lease is a five-year term. Starts January 1st, 2026. All other parameters stay the same. We ask it to update. I'm being nice to the agent, please.
Yeah. Throughout the quarter, we will get many calls from our clients, as Aditya mentioned, asking us to model a new lease, an amendment. There is a downtime that we need to send it in a day or two days. With using this tool, we'd be able to tell them on the phone what happened to the value, how did it impact the value, which is really huge efficiency.
Yeah. As you can see here, again, the agent is being transparent. It's telling the user what it's doing. It'll go in and identify what part of the model, what part of the lease schedule it needs to make the update. We'll try to identify the empty suite here, in this case, suite 15066. It'll go in and update. As you can see, it's identified the right spot. It'll give the user that visual cue, and then we'll go in and make the update. There you go. It adds commentary on what happened, how it changes the income, anything changed materially or not, so on and so forth. All right. Now, moving on to a different kind of user journey and a feature that we worked on. We've heard a lot of questions from our user pain points around, "What if something happens?
I want to do X. I want to do Y. I have some capital in hand. I want to deploy that. I want to plan a renovation. What may happen? What may not happen? They ask these kind of what-if questions to the agent. Now, this agent here can do that. Let's slide the report out of the way. Let's let the user focus on the agent at hand and the conversation. Let's collaborate with the agent. I'm planning a CAD 2 million renovation in, say, 2027. Please update. I'm being nice again. Peter, how does the market feel about this?
You can look at this from the perspective of evaluation. I am also wanting to think about other use cases in this, preparing an investment committee memo. Looking at your acquisitions, if you are a bit more opportunistic investor, the question that you are just raising is going to be very relevant, right? I am going to build this old building, but I want to renovate it. I want to spend money. I want to be able to quickly answer this, and I want to make sure that this is a deal that is going to help me making my strategic objectives and my targets that I am putting out there with my LPs. Being able to do this like this in just a few seconds, yeah, that is a game changer.
This is going to create a lot of scalability for those teams that are working through all of those deals so they can start processing 20 deals rather than the 10 deals that they might be doing each week.
That's awesome. As you can see, the agent came back and outlined how it changes the cash flow across the years. Okay. Now, the last piece of feature that I want to showcase today is the ARGUS model, the currency of the industry that moves around. As you mentioned, acquisition analysts and brokers get their hands on an ARGUS model. They want to see what is in there. They want to interrogate the data quickly. The agent can do that too. Let's go back to the landing page. I have an ARGUS model here. I'm going to drag and drop it. I click go, and the Wi-Fi is still working. The agent goes back and then brings that out for this particular property in question. That, folks, is breakthrough innovation in Agentic AI that we've brought to the platform.
Really excited that I was able to demo this today. I am going to hand off to Rick Kalvoda, the President of Valuation Advisory, to round this out.
Thanks, Aditya. Good morning, everyone. Wow. Was that not impressive? I'm excited about this. I'm speaking as someone who has been in this industry for 35 years. This is transformational. This is something that will change the way we operate, not only in the commercial real estate valuation side of the business, but everything we do in the commercial real estate industry. Why is that? As I think back to 35 years ago when I started doing commercial real estate valuations, what did I do back then? I manually typed a rent roll. I manually typed an INE statement. I manually inputted that into a DCF model and then spent hours going out and collecting data to bring that together to come up with the value conclusion. This changes that. This changes it to another level. Why does it do it?
The first thing is, 90% of what we do in the valuation process today, and not just us, but everyone in the industry, 90% of that is menial, mundane, and repetitive. It's stuff that does not add anything, any value to the end product. It's stuff that you just have to do to get to the 10% of what really adds value in coming up with the value of that asset. This changes it by automating it and bringing it right to the expert. The second thing that is transformational is we spend a lot of time going out and collecting that data relevant to that asset to come up with that value conclusion. This now centralizes that data, brings it to the expert, and not going out to disparate data sources and trying to find different what is particular to that specific asset.
It brings that to the expert, customized for that specific data. Then, again, they can focus on the 10% that matters to come up with that value conclusion. Next is, as Peter mentioned, the obvious question that any expert, whether it's Lauren or anybody on our team or anybody in the industry, Jim or Joe and Chris, they're going to ask is, "Can I trust this? Can I trust the output from this?" Two important things that we talked about that was critical and this brings is, one, it's transparent. It's not a black box. Just as Peter said, you can download the model at any point from this and audit and go down to the individual factual tenant information and understand where that value came from. That is critical for this. Second is it's run by the expert.
The expert takes the output of that and comes up with the value conclusion. It's not relying on just what comes out of that. Two very important things as to what makes this transformational. Finally, if you take 90% of anything out of any process, and especially if it's menial, mundane, and repetitive, and doesn't add any value to the end conclusion, imagine how much more you can do with the 10% that does matter. That is critical not only to us and to the valuer and to the people in the industry, but it's to our clients and customers who now what they can do, and this will now help even more with the performance and the management of their portfolios.
Very excited about the changes that we're seeing here and how we're going to use it, how the industry is going to use it. Before I pass it back to Camilla, I just want to reemphasize one of the things that you kind of heard throughout this morning is it's not just because AI is here. It's not just in what Aditya has done in a short amount of time. Technology is a very big part of it. It's also Lauren and the 400 experts that we have in Valuation Advisory and them working very closely with the technology team to come up with what it's helping them. They live and breathe the valuation process every single day of every single month of every single quarter.
It's them working with Aditya and Peter and Matt and helping them understand not only what we do, what's in that valuation process, but what part is menial, mundane, and repetitive that we need to solve for. That's what they did here. It is the technology, it is the experts that we have, but then also very critical, it is the data. It's not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, not even millions. It's tens of millions of models with hundreds of data points in each of those models that allows the experts and the technology to bring this together to come up with the solutions that you're seeing here. I'm excited about what I've seen. I'm even more excited about what this will continue to evolve for and look forward to the future with that. With that, I'll pass it back to Camilla.
Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, everyone. I think we'll take a 20-minute break, which I believe would put us at actually, I don't have a watch. So 20 minutes from now, there's coffee and snacks outside.
Whenever skies look gray to me and trouble begins to brew, whenever the winter winds become too strong, I concentrate on you. When fortune cries nay, nay to me and people declare you're through, whenever the blues become my only song, I concentrate on you. On your smile so sweet, so tender, when at first my kiss you decline. On the light in your eyes when you surrender and once again our arms intertwine. And so when wise men say to me that love's young dream never comes true, to prove that even wise men can be wrong, I concentrate on you. I concentrate and.
Oh, testing, testing. One, two, three. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay. Testing, one, two. Testing, testing, testing, testing. Check, one, two.
Excellent.
All right. Thanks.
Living for you is easy living. It's easy to live when you're in love. And I'm so in love. There's nothing in life but you. I never regret the years I'm giving. They're easy to give. When you're in love, I'm happy to do whatever I do for you. For you, maybe I'm a fool, but it's fine. People say you're rude with one wave of your hand. Darling, it's grand. They just don't understand. Living for you is easy living. It's easy to live when you're in love. And I'm so in love. There's nothing in life but you. L is for the way you look at me. O is for the only one I see. V is very, very extraordinary. E is even more than anyone that you adore can love. Is all that I can give to you. Love is more than just a game for two.
Two in love can make it. Take my heart and please do not break it. Love was made for me and you. L is for the way you look at me. O is for the only one I see. V is very, very extraordinary. E is even more than anyone that you adore can love. Is all that I can give to you. Love is more than just a game for two. Two in love can make it. Take my heart and please do not break it. Love was made for me and you. Love was made for me and you. Love was made for me and you. A fine romance with no kisses. A fine romance, my friend. This is, we should be like a couple of hot tomatoes. You are as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes. A fine romance you will not nestle. A fine romance you will not wrestle.
I might as well play bridge with my old mate Hans. I haven't got a chance. This is a fine romance.
Test, test, test, test. I do not touch it. You guys are going to turn it on and off. Okay. Awesome.
You're going to be standing or sitting?
I'll be standing.
All right.
Yeah, I'll be sitting for a while, for about 40 minutes, and then I'll get up to stand.
We just fizz like pots of settler's powder. Yes, a fine romance with no glitches. A fine romance with no bitches. You're just as hard to land as the Eden of France. I haven't got a chance. This is a fine romance. A fine romance, my good fellow. You take romance and I'll take cello. You're calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. At least they flap their fins to express emotion. A fine romance with no quarrels, with no insults at all morals. I've never mustered crease in your blue search pants. I never get the chance. This is a fine romance.
Check, check, check. One, two, one, two.
It's a fine romance. My dear judges, two old fogies who need clutches. True love should have the thrills that a healthy crime has. For we don't have the thrills that the martial time has. But I'm a very fine romance, my good woman. My strong edge in the wood, woman. You never give the audience a center glance. No, you like cactus plants. This is a fine romance. A fine romance, my dear judges. Two old fogies who need clutches.
True love should have the thrills that a healthy crime has. You know, Louis, we don't have half the thrills that the martial time has.
You're telling me fine romance, my very good woman. My strong edge in the wood, woman. You never give the audience a center glance.
You're like we prefer cactus plants. This is a fine romance.
Time after time, I tell myself that I'm so lucky to be loving you. So lucky to be the one you run to see in the evening when the day is through. I only know what I know. The passing years will show you've kept my love so young, so new. Time after time.
Just give him another mic check.
Hello. Hello. Testing, testing. All right. Thirty. All right. Yeah.
Loving you. I only know what I know. The passing years will show you've kept my love so young, so new. Time after time, you'll hear me say that I'm so lucky to be loving you. I say I'll move the mountains, and I'll move the mountains if he wants them out of the way. Crazy he calls me. Sure, I'm crazy. Crazy in love, I'd say. I say I'll go through fire, and I'll go through fire. As he wants it, so will it be. Crazy he calls me. Sure, I'm crazy. Crazy in love, you see. Like the wind that shakes the wall, he moves me with a smile. The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.
I say I'll care forever, and I mean forever, if I have to hold up the sky. Crazy he calls me. Sure, I'm crazy. Crazy in love am I. The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while. I say I'll care forever, and I mean forever, if I have to hold up the sky. Crazy he calls me. Sure, I'm crazy. Crazy in love am I.
Hello. Good afternoon. Good morning. Welcome to the party. All good?
Okay. Thank you.
Super.
Take me home. Take me home once more. The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that. No, no, they can't take that away from me. The way your smile just beams, the way you sing off key, the way you haunt my dreams. No, no, they can't take that away from me. We may never, never meet again on the bumpy road to love. Still, I always, always keep the memory of the way you hold your knife, the way we dance till three, the way you change your life. No, no, they can't take that away from me. No, they can't take that away from me. The way you hold your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory, the memory of all that. No, they can't take that away from me.
The way your smile just beams, the way you sing off key, the way you haunt my dreams. No, no, they can't take that away from me. We may never, never, never meet again on the bump, bumpy road to love. Still, I always keep the memory of the way you hold your knife, the way we dance till three.
One, two, three, testing.
Is it good?
Good.
Good.
Good.
You see? Okay. My life. No, no, can't take that away from me. Can't take that away from me. You ready to, or do I just say? Ok
ay. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Or good morning, I guess, though. Okay. If we could. Okay. Okay. I think we're ready to get started. At least do you want to check if anyone's out? Thank you. All right. Thank you. I hope you guys enjoyed the break. I would like to thank our great demo team. That was such a terrific showcase of the innovations. Every time I see it, I walk away feeling just even more enthused about what's to come. Thank you, guys. That was really great.
We're going to move on to the next session, the financial update, which is a great opportunity to walk you through not only the new financial disclosures we'll be rolling out with our Q4 results, but also the new cap allocation framework that we press released today. With that, I would love to introduce Pawan Chhabra, our CFO, and Mike Gordon to take to the stage and to take us through the next session. Thank you.
There is a thought here you shouldn't sit so close to each other.
Yeah.
This is the last thing you should do. Okay. Hopefully you like that. We did tell you how to kill AI now. The problem is going to go through all the disclosures that we talked about and where they really are and setting up these things. We're both the leaders at the end of the day. What we tell you guys is how you operate. You make sure that those metrics go all the way down through the organization so that people can understand and you can align them to shareholders and then you're aligned with your customers. If you think about it as trying to, that's how you can try to do this in the right way to make sure it's coming out.
As to the portfolio that we talked about, obviously, we talked about what we're trying to do best and how we're going to do that. We are very comfortable with that. Like I said, we have really good people in those units. Excellent people. It is everything. It's just that simple. I.
If we can't be the right home to them, then they should be somewhere else. I did get a couple of questions also during the break. Does this mean you're going to be looking at some non-core analytics products? The answer is yes. At the end of the day, it's very simple for me when you take a look at the product set and what we have on the truck. If you can't make something be at least just one adjacency over and there's too much distance between what your core is and what that is, and you're not going to build that bridge, it's probably not for us. The reason being is, while it might be really good software, we won't do the right thing for that software ultimately because we'll continue to invest in the things that we would define as core.
That is going to be working, and we are going to be looking at that. Again, same time frames. It's something that we want to do. We gave some midterm targets. Yeah, guys. Everybody knows the Rule of 40 companies kind of stuff. Our management team believes in it. We're going to push on that. Again, on the consolidated level. I have to keep saying consolidated level because you guys have been looking at us for years in a different way, and we've kind of conditioned you to look at us this way. We don't want to be that way anymore. I mean, at the end of the day, this is who we are.
Finally, and again, we'll sit back about this, as Pawan's told me this for the last two weeks, every day, he wakes up and he keeps telling me, "Mike, we're the best prop tech investment that's out there. So why would we use the money any other way?" That's how we're looking at it. We are going to be increasing our go-forward capital allocation. We'll talk through that. We're going back. I feel like it's a back to the future moment. Before we exited tax, we actually had a set target, and we just got away from that a little bit. We're going to get back to where we were. We think that this is a good place with us. We have really good, strong cash flows.
With those strong cash flows, we should be able to return good value to our shareholders and at the same time ensure that our customers are seeing the investment that we need to do into our product set. With that, I'm going to turn it over to you because I get to play color commentary to this. Pawan is the designated driver for the next 30 minutes.
Yeah. Look, I'm super excited to be here with you guys today. This has been multiple years in the making, and we're very excited to be sharing our new disclosures and how we're thinking about the capital allocation framework going forward. Let me start with the analytics segment revenue reporting. In addition to recurring revenue, we're now going to be breaking out the analytics segment into four categories. The first one being software consisting of ARGUS Intelligence plus a host of other software applications that we're resolving to the platform to become add-ons to ARGUS Intelligence. We heard you. We're carving VMS out separately. It gives you visibility of the tech-enabled expert services that our Valuation Management Solutions team are delivering. We're carving out data and services separately. This represents the standalone elements of data and service. They have a different revenue and gross margin profile.
It is really about making sure that we've got the right level of visibility and clarity on the core franchises of software and VMS, but then also understand the contributions of growth associated with data and services. Ultimately, the point here is to make sure that we're increasing our transparency and giving you the better blueprint to be able to start modeling growth. Let's double-click into the software portfolio. As I mentioned, the software portfolio category consists of ARGUS Intelligence, which represents about two-thirds of our software category. We have a host of complementary software applications that we are resolving to the platform to be able to drive more models and more value into the core. You see those reflected here. Collectively, these are going to help provide a unified user experience for our clients as they utilize ARGUS Intelligence and the add-on capabilities.
Yeah. If you think about it and what David and the team talked about, I mean, again, when we talk about the platform, it's a platform, but it's made up of its services-oriented architecture. We're just developing services, and we're going to put more services out there. The team's already working on the next set of services. When I sit back and say, "I feel comfortable with what we got," we've got a lot of things that we can expand into just within our own portfolio. This is why we're just trying to simplify on this.
Keep going on software. Let's dig a little bit into the financial profile and some of the reporting and metrics that you guys are going to hear from us going forward. First and foremost, we were going to talk about organic revenue growth. We're going to talk about annual recurring revenue growth. As you can see from a year-to-date perspective, annual recurring revenue growing at a healthy 10% growth rate. We're going to be focused on talking about gross and net revenue retention for our software portfolio. Again, this ultimately helps speak to the stickiness that our software solutions provide, but also talk to the tremendous expansion opportunity that we have with our software developing at the platform and rolling out add-on modules. As you think about the path forward for software, really two big growth levers for the business.
One, you've heard Mike talk about the opportunity for us to continue to cross-sell as we deliver more value in the platform and we provide our clients with a quantitative value proposition. Secondly, asset-based pricing, which allows us to get ubiquitous collaboration across a client's enterprise. It drives adoption. It allows us to get deeply embedded into the client workflows. When it comes time for renewal, it gives us pricing opportunity as we continue to become more penetrated into the client's day-to-day.
Yeah. If I added on, I mean, I had a lot of you guys all asked a couple of questions like, "Okay, I look at the gross retention. What should I be thinking about ARGUS?" ARGUS is higher. There is no doubt. ARGUS is in the mid-90%, and you guys understand where that is. You are going to do the math on me. That means the rest of it has some problems. Some of them do. We have some older pieces of product out there and kit that we actually have to sit back and figure out how we are going to retire. There are two ways to retire. Either you let it slip away over time, or you just say, "Okay, we are going to do this, and you have to move to this." I am more partial to the second one.
There are some good reasons why you let it slip over time, but that's just the normal thing when it comes to software. From our perspective, as we're looking at this, what I'm happy with and what I'd like to continue to see is that 15-point difference between gross and net retention. That means we're doing a good job of things when you think about your recurring revenue table. We're not going to be doing anything that's remarkable. You guys are all doing this anyways, but you got your new business, you got your cross-sell, you got your upsell, you got your churn and downsell. The good news is we're not really downselling on our core stuff. The good news is we're not really churning on our core stuff.
What we have is we have what we want to make sure is as we talk as a leadership team, and then we have our guys talk through everything else going down into our organization, is that we really want to understand, like, "Okay, once you landed here, how can we get them to use more?" I want our VMS guys to be talking to our guys about software. They're not software salespeople. I don't expect Rick to do that, but Rick is pretty good as a software salespeople. You heard him today. I don't expect that. What I do expect is that as the funds are using us, there's so much we can bring to them and so much data that we can bring to them and so much information that each piece that we're showing, I think, becomes a lot stronger.
That is where these things coming together make sense. While we have broken the two pieces out so you can see them, at the same point, we do think that they are very synergistic.
Excellent. Let's look at our second category, VMS. Again, as you all are familiar, VMS delivers trusted valuation insight and compliance to some of our largest clients around the world. The valuation process creates a lot of exhaust data, and we provide independent oversight to manage that process. We also normalize that data and put it into ARGUS Intelligence. At the end of a VMS process, we have a very thorough conversation with the clients, as you saw in the demo, in regards to what are the drivers of growth, what are the attributions of growth. That leads to a very fulsome conversation from a VMS perspective. As we think about the path forward on VMS, our VMS teams internally now are leveraging ARGUS Intelligence. Now they can go faster, and they can process through information in a much more efficient manner.
As you think about the convergence between software and VMS, we can now take the relationships that we have on VMS and look at their assets that may not have the same compliance requirements and deliver the same type of output that we're delivering from a VMS perspective. It is a very synergistic relationship in regards to how we're growing VMS and software and how they are both complementary to growth.
Hey. Yeah. I've said enough about it. I mean, Rick will be walking on water later. Maybe you too, Lauren, if you want to see what they really know how to do in this space.
Keeping with the theme in regards to reporting and how we're going to talk about VMS going forward, again, very similar to software, we will look at the organic revenue growth, and we'll also talk about the annual recurring revenue growth number. The most important measure for me within the VMS business is really understanding that gross logo retention. What it does is it showcases the durability that we have with our clients, whether it's an up market or whether it's a down market. Our gross retention is remarkably high and a testament to the power that our teams deliver. Again, as we think about path forward and growth from a VMS perspective, we're going to continue to have secular tailwinds that's going to drive capital into the CRE space, which will translate into more assets being deployed.
As our teams become more efficient to deliver the VMS output, it allows us to be able to enter new customer fund types at potentially different price points. It really expands the addressable market for what VMS can serve because we can process information much more efficiently now.
Yeah. With what you saw out there today, I mean, this is a piece that I think a piece of the business that we think will grow and will grow consistently and grow well. The reason being is at the end of the day, we have the best people and we have the best mousetraps. As a result of this, we're going to do a good job of like anybody else can go out there and do this. There's plenty of good people out there, but it's the combination of the two things. What we're going to be able to do is our guys know how to ask the right questions to the system. Now, the AI will continue to evolve, and people will start to get there, but that's when we'll give them more and more tools. This is not just a step in time.
This is going to be like what Matt was trying to show you with looking back over five years. We look at this going forward over five years, this business and the assets that we can deploy on this platform based off what our team's doing, we expect this to grow and be a really good pillar for us going forward.
All right. Thanks. Data and services, and again, as I mentioned, this represents the standalone opportunity for data and services. Obviously, given the different growth profile and margin profile, we are carving this separate to provide cleaner optics in regards to what's happening with our two core franchises. It also gives you a baseline in regards to how these businesses are progressing. From a data perspective, we've got Data Studio in Canada. We have the Reonomy in the U.S . When you take a look at the revenue trajectory here, we've talked at our various earnings calls that we have a lot of scale episodic clients in the data business that have churned out. We expect that to normalize over time. Services represents our premium support around our ARGUS products and services. We are consciously exiting non-core areas where it doesn't involve implementing ARGUS solutions.
Carving that out separately allows you to understand the dynamics of that driving in versus bleeding it in into a total recurring revenue number, which decreases your visibility. This is really about giving you the toolsets to be able to model our business appropriately and have the right transparency in regards to the contributions of growth that data and service bring to the total analytic segment.
On the data side, I know you guys will take a look at the gross margin and say, "Okay, can you guys do better?" The answer is going to be yes. There's been a lot of work that has been done over the last couple of years that we've been curating the data. This is not just keeping the data on every property and having like a file where you just open it up internally. This is actually pulling the data into some sort of usable foundation that we can use for analytics. That curation did take some time and effort. How you curate that data coming in and making it usable for our customers and our clientele and our AI, it was good, right? You can now get to the questions that you need to get to.
We expect our gross margin to improve on that. When you take a look at our services, one of the things that we're also doing is we're making it easier to deploy our products. I mean, people do not want long implementations. You saw in the product set that we can now ingest rent rolls. All right? That was a large piece at one point of doing a lot of work around services to get that working. Now that we have that in the product, we expect that to go down. We're still going to have to do some of the value-added services. There's no doubt about it, but we're not necessarily looking at managing ourself in that manner. At the end of the day, software, data, analytics, and then that value-added services or that advisory role that we play, that's what we want to play.
Just entering data, not where we want to be. We want to get that done in our platform as much as possible.
Simplifying the portfolio, obviously a big theme. Mike started the meeting, and you guys read our press release in regards to the immediate work that we're doing on that front. Let me take you back a little bit. When we divested the property tax business, we purposefully announced in that press release that we're accelerating our transformation to a pure play software data and analytics platform. What that means is we're very comfortable shrinking to grow, shrinking to grow more profitably by disposing of non-core and low-margin businesses. It allows us to have clarity in regards to our capital allocation perspective. It allows us to deploy our capital in a smart way, and it allows us to take a lot of costs out of the business.
To that end, as you guys heard this morning, we're in advanced conversations on divesting the appraisal business, hopefully with the Q1 output.
Very advanced. We have an LOI. I have to put that out there for Terry.
We're also.
A signed LOI.
We're also in the process of advanced conversations on the Appraisals and Development Advisory business as well too.
Not as advanced. Sorry.
Not as advanced. Several conversations on the DA business that we're hopefully going to provide you more updates on going forward. Obviously, as Mike just referenced, there are some non-core elements, products and services within the analytics segment that we've talked about at the earnings calls that we're also going to look to divest. Again, this is really about simplify to grow and how do we just make sure that we've got strategic clarity in regards to where the value is, and it's really around ARGUS, VMS, and the platform.
I think if I just added one more word in here that I didn't open up with, but we've talked about it as a leadership team and a board, is predictability. As we've been trying to pull the businesses together, we want to be very predictable with how we're flowing, how that's happening, so that we can give you guys that over time that we're just going to continue to roll. I mean, a boring business that's predictable that continues to hit what it needs to hit is not a bad business. I would rather be a little bit boring and predictable than being a little less predictable. That is why as we go through all these metrics, that is why when we look at these, these foundational metrics will help us bring that out to you guys.
That predictability will make my life a lot easier as well too.
Yeah, me too. Yeah.
That's great. Thanks for that, Mike.
I'm trying.
Look, in terms of the P&L, I'll keep it brief, but the point of this page really is to show you that we're changing the format of a P&L from a presentation by nature to a presentation by function, which hopefully will give you a lot more clarity in regards to the moving parts within the business. It'll highlight the strength of our analytics business and the gross profit and margins that we're driving and continue to drive in that space. Equally as important for me and hopefully for you as well too is we have a lot of corporate cost in the business. Big focus area for us. Again, the catalyst to be able to action corporate costs is to simplify the business. We're breaking down and breaking out in a more traditional fashion.
You can see our path on how we're going to optimize R&D, sales, and marketing, and G&A. It will become a part of our talk track as we go forward. I wanted to make sure that you all had very clean optics in regards to how that's impacting growth and measure our performance and see if we do what we say over time to be able to achieve that. This new format will allow us to be able to get to that state pretty quickly.
Yeah. When we look at some of the metrics and the ratios we have here, we know we have some work to do. There is no doubt that we have some work to do. You guys can all come back and tell me where certain numbers should be. I would agree with you. I would agree with you. This is what we are going to be doing in 2026. Actually, it starts after we are done with you today. This was the first two weeks. The next two weeks start with that. That is where we are going to sit back and talk about as an organization how we are going to run.
We've had that discussion already, but now it's really saying, "Okay, now how do we do that and apply that across the business so that when you look at us and as we move into that software type of business, that SaaS type of business, you'll see all these metrics start to get into what you think the business should look like." I mean, this is why Pawan's been working on this, and there's a lot of things that he and his team have been lifting. Now we know how to do it, and now we're going to start executing on it.
Great. As it relates to midterm goals, and as you guys heard from Mike this morning, look, our path on simplification and driving operating efficiencies within the business give us a lot of conviction on our ability to hit our midterm goals. Our midterm goal is anchored on being a Rule of 40, 40-plus company exiting 2027. How do we do that? Looking at it from a revenue perspective, we expect revenue on a consolidated basis to grow at the high single-digit level across Altus All-In. Within that, that means that ARGUS Intelligence is going to grow in the double digit. Again, the transition to asset-based pricing and deeper adoption that we get within the client base and the fact that we're bringing all of this power into the platform is going to accelerate our abilities to be able to cross-sell.
From a VMS perspective, we're expecting growth to be in the mid-single-digit growth, mid to high single-digit growth for VMS. Again, that's a combination of a CRE volume recovery that we're expecting to see in the marketplace. More importantly, we're also making our teams more efficient so now they can address a wider array of customer types and fund types at potentially different price points. Again, to Mike's point earlier this morning is how do we disconnect ourselves from the market? It's about making ourselves more efficient, driving more quantifiable value to our clients, and therefore making us a very useful tool in a down market or in an up market. From a margin perspective, we're applying the same discipline. You guys have seen our track record in regards to what we're doing from a cost savings perspective.
A lot of low-hanging fruit for us to still hit that, particularly as we continue to simplify the business. Obviously, the adoption of ARGUS Intelligence internally is huge because it drives significant value for us from a service delivery perspective. It lowers our cost to serve. At the same time, the innovation that spins out of the work that we're consuming internally is what we're now taking to the market as well too. That is a tremendous opportunity for us from a cost perspective of drinking our own champagne and leveraging our tools to be able to operate more efficiently. You've heard our story about our love for our India location and the Global Service Center. It was not really a model that was in our DNA in the years past. We've proven that.
We've won the hearts and minds of our own internal associates that there is a tremendous advantage of leveraging India and the great talent that we have there to be able to take best practices and standardize that abroad. Significant cost leverage for us as well too, and a great model for us to continue to scale. Obviously, there is a lot of opportunity for us from a G&A perspective to rationalize our corporate costs, reduce our facilities' footprints, and really just right-size the organization as we continue to simplify and grow.
Yeah. I think as we go through this, when you look at this slide, I think there's a lot of work to do here. I would tell you right now, we feel really good about our path on the cost side because we know what we're going to do around that. We are going to start executing on that starting in an hour or two. What I would tell you, I had a lot of people from the board and from the team saying, "Going from 2% to high single digits, Mike, are you sure you want to put yourself out there on that?" Yes. If we do not put a goal out there and we do not go get to that goal, if I just go medium single digits, they did tell me not to put a number. HSD is the new acronym of the day.
If we do not set our goals to something, how are we ever going to achieve it? This company has grown, and we have assets that are growing at that pace right now and actually are growing at low double digits. In my mind, there are four mutually exclusive ways to grow. Very simply. Number one, we get new customers. We think that we can go down market effectively with the platforms that we have. We have integrated Forbury and ARGUS Intelligence. We feel pretty good about that, that we can add a lot of value down there, and that also allows Rick to go down market too. Secondly, you raise price. Now, for all the used people on camera, that does not mean we are going to raise price.
What we will do is we will bundle differently, and we think that there's benefits for that, and there's more value that we can get with our customers around that. We will leverage that a little bit. The third area is that we're going to introduce new products. You got to see those new products walking out the door today. The fourth area is to reduce churn. The team's done a pretty good job of that. We can do a little bit more with that. If we just focus on each one of those four things and you just get small improvements in each, you go from 2% up to 8%-9% pretty quickly. Again, I'm not out here preaching to you that we're going to turn that around immediately.
What I will say, regardless of the market, that's how we're going to be looking at this, and that's how we're going to be managing this so that we can get to those numbers as quickly as possible. I see the path, and we'll be looking at this quarterly, and we'll get there. Again, they told me not to put out high single digits. I don't care. We're going to get there, and we're going to find a way to that. If I have to come up here in a year or two and you guys can say, "I told you so," then we'll deliver something differently. We're going to find our way there because we've done it before, and we can do it again.
Let's talk about our capital allocation framework. Again, for us, driving the most value back to shareholders is our North Star. As we think about our priorities from a capital allocation perspective, first and foremost, we're going to continue to invest in the business, in organic growth of the business, to fuel and fund our innovation going forward. We're going to maintain our dividend. It's a great, consistent way to return value back to shareholders. We're going to continue to, and as we started off, we're going to continue to opportunistically look at M&A opportunities. Again, the best M&A opportunity for us right now is to buy our own stock, and we'll talk about that in the next page in a bigger way. Lastly, we are comfortable with taking our debt leverage ratio up to 2.5 times.
We have a very strong cash flow generation within our business. We have a very healthy balance sheet, and we have a lot of comfort that we can run at a slightly higher net debt leverage ratio and still operate efficiently.
I agree.
You heard in regards to our conviction behind our future and our conviction in regards to the confidence that we have in our growth, and nothing can demonstrate that more with the fact that the board has approved a CAD 500,000,000 share buyback for 2026. How are we going to roll this out? We're rolling out a SIB early next week. You guys saw the pricing in regards to where we're placing it from in the press release in the CAD 50-CAD 57 range as a Dutch auction. That's going to be launching next week. That will close sometime in Q1. We're keeping flexibility then up to the CAD 500,000,000 mark to run an NCIB, which kicks in in February. It gives us a lot of flexibility during the course of the year to continue to support our stock.
Again, very comfortable with over time progressing to 2.5 times debt leverage, but a very strong positioning in regards to the conviction that we have in regards to our future and the support that we're putting behind it.
Yeah. I think from what you see is this is getting back to where some of the numbers were a couple of years ago and actively managing this further. As Pawan said, this is the best investments on ourselves right now. I think we have the best software here, so we continue to build that. We'll invest in ourselves. If we see something, we see something. We are focusing here right now.
Excellent. I think we're right at time. We are going to open it up to Q&A now. I am going to ask David Ross and Rich Sarkis, Dan Hurley, if they are coming to join us.
My fellow colleagues, that's right.
The hot seats right here.
The hot seats.
Mike, by the way, who was they?
What?
Who are they who are trying to keep you from the high single digit?
Some of the people, I don't know. Some people were just telling me yesterday. I was a little, yeah, it's okay, man. I don't bite.
We try to under-promise, overachieve.
We're going to go better than that.
We'll go better.
Yeah, yeah. We'll overachieve.
Okay. Thanks all for joining us. We'll start off with some questions. We'll start with the audience. I'll also try to take some questions from our online participants. Just to keep the logistics a little bit simpler, if you could raise your hand. We have Brandy over there who will come by with the mic so that we could let the online participants hear you clearly as well. Opening up the floor then. Okay. Yeah.
That was quick.
Thank you.
Hi, Nick Appelo at Capco Asset Management. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the VMS customer base and maybe if you could give any more color on the mix of that business by fund type and what are the sort of growth exposures that will drive growth there on a customer basis? Is it assets flowing into private equity funds or other fund types? Thank you.
I told you you had the middle seat.
Yeah. The best way to look at it is if you look at the biggest investors across the globe, the biggest investment managers, we work with those. We have about 170-some clients. Most of those are in the top 200-300 global investors. If you think of anyone that has a large portfolio that requires frequent valuation, we generally work with those types of customers. It's generally, and because of the compliance base that you heard, a component that we provide, it's generally the open-ended funds. There is trading on a monthly, quarterly, even in some cases daily basis. They need that independent oversight of that process where we come in and help with that and provide that oversight.
Where we see going forward, as Pawan mentioned, is because of what we can do, where it's not a required component from a client's perspective, but rather it's something that, yep, we need a value, but it's not as critical. No one's transacting on it for financial reporting purposes. There's opportunity there, and that represents with our existing customers about double the opportunity, double the market share, or double the expansion opportunity because that's in the closed-end funds, that's in the separate accounts where it's coming up with values just for reporting purposes. With the tools, not only providing it at a more cost-effective cost effective for them, but then also with the analytics and all of the output that they get from that, that presents even more of a reason for them to use our services in combination with the technology and analytics that we have.
That presents a big opportunity going forward. It also opens up into, and you mentioned private equity. As we see, historically, most of these open-ended funds have been in the defined benefit space. We're seeing more and more now, whether it's NTRs, whether it's the daily funds, where it's more and more into the defined contribution side of the business. That's just going to grow more and more going forward. We've seen a lot of growth in that over the past five, six, seven years. That's just going to grow even more exponentially going forward.
Okay. Thanks for the question, Nick. Any? Yes. Paul, thank you. Just right over there. Brandy.
She's got this.
Paul from RBC Capital Markets. Coming to you.
Hi. A couple of questions. I was Paul Treiber from RBC. A couple of questions. One on data. Can you speak to the market coverage of Altus ID and then also of ARGUS Cloud in terms of assets globally covered? Related to that data question is on just the data rights. I believe with ARGUS Cloud, you have rights from an anonymous and aggregate basis. Has there been any pushback from clients on those rights when they move over?
You want to start? You want to go?
I'll go first.
Okay.
I'll cover it.
I got the third.
In terms of the asset data, we have a whole variety of different sources that help us bring that onto the platform from public, commercial, customer, and so forth. Coverage was, I think, your key question. It follows our markets to a large extent, so very highly concentrated in North America between the U.S. and Canada, better concentration in Canada. In terms of other markets, we will drop off from that point of view. The other part of the question, sorry.
Yeah. Just to make a finer point on that, just to be clear, everywhere our customers have assets currently in our system, the Altus ID resolves. It does follow our customers, as David was saying. The second part of the question was.
Our user rights and our opt-ins and how we have rights to use the data. We do have a large proportion of our customers in terms of providing rights to the use of the data, but it is an anonymized aggregated approach. We are not trading on that information. We are using it to help us derive those insights. That is where that combination of the AI, you see that therefore in the benchmarks and that, for example.
If I would just follow on on it, not to pile on on it for you, Paul, at the end of the day, the insights that we're giving based off the flow of data, I always like the derivative. I would love to be able to pull up and just give everybody the data as well, but those are things we don't have. What we've done is at some point, we have actually put it into a format that everybody could use. There is a day that maybe we'll convince some people that we could have that. For now, what we have is we have all the insights on top of that data. As you can see, those are value-added things that our customers want us to do. The Benchmark Manager runs on that.
The ability to get down to that low location is going to be incredibly important. As we continue to get more and more assets on the platform, that becomes incredibly important. Back to your number of assets, it's changing all the time. We'll get you a better number of what that is. If I sat back and talked to one of the brokers who was looking at the sets of assets that we have, I think that there's four times the number of assets they can now put on the platform that they had never thought of before. One of the reasons why, and I think you heard from some of our customers that they were playing sort of the bingo game on how many assets do they want to put in the platform because they're trying to manage that.
If all of this just gets into the fund and we just have that working through, then it's a really simple thing for them, and they can actually just use it. There's a little bit of a move that we, and it's not as hard as you think. They're actually starting to understand that I can use this much more broadly, and I can share this across different units and stuff. That becomes useful for them. I think from our view is we're going to see a huge increase in the number of assets really in 2026 and 2027 because the collaboration opportunity is huge for them.
Stephen MacLeod, you will. Over to Brandy.
Thank you. Thanks, Camilla. Thanks, everyone. Just on your core ARGUS software business, and Mike, when you talked about the growth levers, you mentioned new client growth and going down market. I was just wondering if you can give some color as to how we can think about what that opportunity looks like, whether it's market share or kind of how you segment the market and where you think you are stronger and where you have opportunity.
I think Rick explained on his side of the business, but there's an analogous part right there where we're strong and we see we can move into those other pieces as well. To be honest with you, I've always had an interest in banks like you. The product is needed there. You do lend to these guys, and there is something that we haven't made very simple. As we simplify and we've made it easier to use Forbury and we've used more with that Excel front end, we think that there's a good opportunity to take one step over and create that exchange of data in a better way and then simplify how you're going to evaluate that. That is one angle.
Going down market into these other funds and going down market into smaller areas is something that we've always had an issue with as well because people would sit back. I'm only looking at a couple of assets. How do I can do this easier? That is a bundling question. I think that there are many rooms for us to move to. That is why when I sit back and I think about the growth, and I think you saw on the slide that we're expecting 20% from new customers and 80% from the cross-sell. We have a lot of good cross-sell opportunities, but we think that we can move into these different areas and attack this in a better way. Rick likes the software too, so that is going to help us.
Just to make one additional point on that is the geographic expansion as well. As you zoom out outside of North America, there is a lot of local tropicalization, if you will, of how valuations are done across Namibia, APAC, etc. I think Chris started to allude to that. Again, the packaging of the Excel interface.
What is tropicalization?
I practiced it.
Okay.
With that Excel interface, you allow the sort of nuances of the various valuation methodologies to be captured pretty easily.
I think Rich wants to go to some islands.
I would just add it's a very exciting part of this opportunity that when we look at customers that spend at least X amount, our first analysis, we just said, what do the customers look like that spend CAD 100,000 with us a year? How many more of those can we find? The answer is many, many times more. I won't give you the number, but using that profile, finding them and going out to get them has been an exciting part of the motion for sales over this 18 months here.
Okay. We'll take our next question from a virtual participant, Paul Steve, who actually was a former sell-side analyst at Scotia, now at Dunlop Capital. Pawan, this one's for you. Can you please speak to how much stranded cost you expect to have and the timeline to remove those costs from the operations, assuming we close the signed LOI in the near term?
Yeah. First of all, with the property tax divestiture, maybe taking it one step back, we're exiting the calendar year with no stranded cost. That's great news from an appraisal perspective and the likelihood. We are also going to action that stranded cost pretty quickly. It's a small portion. It's a smaller business, but there are some centralized costs that are supported that will not go with the deal that we'll have to resolve. We'll exit that 2026 with no stranded cost.
Okay. Mike, there was a follow-up for you. Are the new operating metrics that are being introduced today aligned with management compensation, or will they be implemented in the 2026 compensation cycle for the relevant managers within the business?
Yes, for 2026. 2025 has it, what I would say, more in a management by objectives. I like to get to just the metrics as a whole. I think we're going to be a lot more aligned. Again, something that we need as a leadership team is to drive this down multiple levels so it's very clear what good looks like.
We have one over there. Yeah. Thank you.
We're making you run.
Yes.
You're getting your steps in.
You're giving us a moment too.
Yeah.
Thanks. This is John Schall from TD Cowen. Two questions on divestment. The first one is, how should we think about your corporate costs post the divestment? The second question is, I believe you also mentioned plans to divest other non-core analytics assets, any color on that? Thanks.
Yeah.
Do you want to take the corporate cost?
Yeah. I'll take the corporate cost. Look, there is an allocation that we give to the appraisal business that is part of corporate costs. It's not a very material number, but we have a clear path on how we would exit that cost out of the business coming out.
Yeah. Back to Pawan's comment earlier, our view is that that's going to be rectified all within the 2026 cycle. That's our goal. Actually, our plan, our goal, and our mission, just to be clear. As to the other things that we would look at, there are some software products that, again, as I said earlier, that are a couple of adjacencies away from what we do. I always sit back and ask my teams, how close is this to it? How are you going to invest in this? What's going to happen? If it's not adjacent, like I said, it doesn't get the investment that it needs. As we've been looking at and rationalizing the portfolio, we've realized that while we might have had some goals a couple of years ago, those goals were not in those markets.
There are a couple of things that we are looking at right now, but similar to what we talked about with ADA, we will probably put out some notes early next year on which pieces those are.
Okay. Our next question comes from Richard Tse at National Bank Financial. Real estate professionals are historically late adopters of technology. I think we heard that from our panel today.
Not you guys.
From a go-to-market, not you guys. President company excluded. From a go-to-market perspective, how do you go about accelerating the pace of adoption when it comes to monetizing the broad portfolio?
Yeah, I'll take that. I have the most fun job of the folks up here. Ernie, who's back there, our Chief Marketing Officer, and I have the job to do really three things. One, as Joe mentioned earlier, this is not an aggressive industry in terms of its adoption of new technology. The first thing we got to do is educate people about what's possible. That requires partnering with our early adopter customers that really can share the experience of executing on this vision. It's about getting that message out to the rest of the market. I know Rich wants to talk about this as well. I mean, that is the key. As we talked about, this industry lags in adopting technology. We just have to get the message out, educating folks on executing this vision really is delivering the value.
That will jolt people into action.
Yeah. Just to build on that, it's obviously something I'm very passionate about. I've been selling software to commercial real estate for a while now. The things I've found is that whereas I do agree with Richard in terms of historically, it's been sort of a slower laggard in terms of adopting real, meaningful technology. I think a big driver of that is they've been hit as an industry with a lot of cool solutions over the last few years with proptech, CRE tech, etc., that don't really have many problems.
Or said differently, I think a lot of the solutions in the space haven't really been attuned to listening to the voice of the customer, getting something out there early to the Joes and the Chrises of this world, listening to the feedback, even though it might hurt sometimes to say, "Oh, you missed the mark here on the software," or "We want more of that," or "Seeing it differently." Being able to iterate rapidly and build up from that base, I think, has been missing in the industry by and large. I think hopefully you've seen with what the team showed and our voice of the customer that we view things differently and we're not making Dan's job easy where it's order taking, but I do think that's an important part of the equation that sometimes gets overlooked.
Can I say? I got three words: quantifiable, value, proposition. At the end of the day, it is simple. For every dollar that somebody spends with us, they should get CAD 15 in return. Analytics should get that to them, and we should be able to show this. We showed that to you today. We heard from our team today that we expect that we can reduce certain things by 90%. Quantifiable. At the end of the day, people will sit back and say, "I don't believe it, but at CAD 15 to one, wow, maybe I'll get CAD 3 to one. Maybe I'll get CAD 4 to one." We need to make sure that they see that. I don't like talking about qualifiable. My New York office heard today, I heard two days ago, "I want to talk quantifiable." I want to sit back and talk to my customers.
Did you get value from us? Are we doing well with you? Because back to what I said, I'm not raising prices on you guys. We can actually win together. We can say that we grow with them. That is as simple as it gets. That is what we have to do. That is how we have to get it out there. That is where we partner with our customers. Maybe I'll just add to that as well. Part of that adoption is it's seeing the value you get out of it. It is what can the customer use. It's the value add that's created. Going forward, one of the things we're doing is we have 400 internal customers that are using it and seeing the value prop. One is we see it, understand it, and help with the innovation of it.
Probably more importantly, we'll be working with our customers with that. As we're talking on the phone with them, we have it on our platform. We can show them the analytics and the output that comes from that. They will see the benefit of that, and that helps with the go-to-market side of that as well.
Okay. We'll take a question from Sam. Hi, Jules.
Following up on that, could you maybe give some tangible examples of early learnings from folks who have adopted asset-based pricing and what engagement you've seen as you've made the platform available throughout the entire organization as opposed to just the individual users historically?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Two peas in a pod. I'll start and then I'll hand it over to you. Historically, ARGUS Enterprise has been a very powerful tool, but a select few within an organization have used it, but many have benefited from the outputs of ARGUS Enterprise, right? The reports that are generated, the analytics, etc. With asset-based pricing, what you're doing is you're enabling that proliferation of the access to the solution, but that's not enough. You also have to couple it with something like ARGUS Intelligence that taps into that rich data, but allows a non-power user to access the analytics. You really need the duality of asset-based pricing plus a low-friction, easy-to-adopt solution to unlock that user base within a company.
Yeah. I would just say asset-based pricing is one more tool to lower barriers to adoption. We're providing access now to everyone that can get value out of that data instead of, as Rich said, the select few. As we build that out, the organizations are literally getting more value out of what they already had, but more folks are able to drive value from it.
How have you guys changed your customer success team from just a pure sell-in to then monitoring and making sure that engagement is building throughout their organization so they are getting value out of it?
Yeah. We made significant changes this year to our customer success from the way it's organized to the way it's compensated and more fully aligning that team with both sales and support to ensure we're capturing the. This is a very significant change for our customers. It is about making sure everyone understands what is possible, sharing the successes, and then creating that as a compelling vision to get after for those customers. That is what is going to help them take action to get there.
I think if I follow it up, I think we have two areas where we help with customer success. One, I mean, and not to call Rich's team customer success, but they show from the standpoint of how to get the most value out of it when they just talk about how they're using the system and how they're working with it. They do so much more than that, but every day that they work with our customers in that and they work through the appraisals, they are really working through how to get more out of the platform. On our customer success side of things, you have the technical guys who are working through them, how to think about the data, how to think about the data, and how to be using, getting things onto the platform.
The key thing about asset-based pricing is it's great once you put more and more on the platform. Helping them get through that and understanding how to use that and why the Forbury acquisition was so important to us was it opens up the aperture on what we could do. As a board and as we've been watching this, one of the key metrics has been how many assets are on the platform. How are we seeing that? We're seeing that go double from what we've had just a number of months ago. We expect that to continue to go. If we follow that, and that's our internal metric, if we follow that and we continue to push that and help our teams get there, that's a good thing for us.
It's one of those things where rit's like it's not necessarily how we do it, but it's helping them to believe that they can do it and they should be using it as part of their everyday workforce.
Just one follow-up question. Earlier, you were talking about data access and the rights you have to that data. Is there an opportunity to productize that data into some form of index or intelligence that could be externalized?
Yes. Mic drop. Yes. I mean, coming from, again, those of you who know me, I come from a credit bureau industry. And when I look at the way that the bureaus run things, it's not, again, the data that's out there is too variable. Getting down to the main things, like getting the Altus ID in place, starting to understand each and every piece and what are the important pieces of that, having Matt walk you through all the things that you can see out there that are the standard things, and the standard items, there isn't that opportunity coming sooner than later. That said, we will focus on the analytics side of it because those are the rights we have today.
I think that as it becomes more and more evident that this is where the world's moving, that's a good conversation to have with some of our customers.
I think that when you look at what we've put in place with Benchmark Manager, and to be clear, that's been built over an extended period with a lot of feedback from our users. When you compare it to, say, a residential real estate index, they want the specificity. They want to be able to do the drill down and up again. They want a wide variety of property subtypes, and they want to be able to trend on that basis. You saw how we did that in the demo earlier. They also want to do it in a lot more variability around the regions. We have been increasing that level of being able to zoom in and zoom out consistently. I think that's what will contrast it between, say, other indices you have in other markets because they want that flexibility.
They want to dynamically interrogate it, and that's what they get with Benchmark Manager from that perspective. We'll keep adding. We're going to get more and more, as Mike says, more data, more capacity to add more information into it. Obviously, there's opportunity for us to summarize that in different ways based on what we're seeing the market need.
The greatest thing about David is he understands data curation. I mean, just for if anybody wants to talk to him about that, it's not that boring.
Yes. Erin from CIBC. Brandy, if we could just move the mic. Right there. Yeah.
Thanks, Erin from CIBC. Maybe just a question on the segments. First, on the asset divestiture, you mentioned the signed LOI for the appraisals business, and then the development advisory business is a little bit earlier stage. Any clarity you can give us in terms of the size within that segment? Is appraisals the majority of it, or how is that split? If you can give us any detail there. Separately, the additional disclosure on analytics today was great. Maybe have you considered post-divesting the valuation, appraisal, and development advisory business? Did you consider giving EBITDA for each of the individual segments within analytics, or is that something that you thought about?
You want to start or?
Yeah. Sure. In regards to the EBITDA within the individual businesses, again, we're crafting a P&L that's by function versus by nature. Hopefully that'll give more clarity in regards to the piece parts and the contribution of growths that each segment is providing within the analytics business. We're not necessarily going to talk about product-level profitability or EBITDA as part of our disclosures. Obviously, again, in regards to the level of disclosures that we're making today, you can get a good idea, at least at a much more granular level in regards to how that breaks out. Aaron, I think I missed the first part of your question.
How big is the appraisals part of the AD&A?
It's about half of it, I believe, off the top of my head in terms of that, in terms of revenue contribution. It's obviously the business, both appraisals and dev advisory, have been facing margin pressure. We've been talking about that pretty openly in regards to our earnings call as our focus was driving to more profitable growth. It's not as much EBITDA in terms of the impact associated with that.
I'll take the under on the half. I think it's pretty darn close.
Okay. Any more questions from the room? Yeah. Eric Ball from Altus Group. Thank you.
Yeah, guys. Thanks for I think you hit on most of my punch list items, but just maybe if you could open the commando a little bit on VMS, is there anything you can tell us about? I know we're not talking about bookings anymore, thankfully, but maybe just kind of like the late.
There is a debate on bookings that I've reopened. I mean, but I'll come back to that one. I think I like ACV better.
Yeah. I think I like the ARR. Yeah, latent earnings power, backlog. Is there a path to, with also expanding into new fund types at VMS, is there a path to getting that to double-digit growth again?
What was the second part?
Is there a path to getting VMS to double-digit growth again?
Yeah. So one, if you look back to 2024, and I believe it was 6.5% in terms of revenue growth, and then it dropped to 2.1%. That drop is actually, so even though Mike does not focus on the market, that is part of our growth that we see in years when clients are adding assets to their portfolios. That is inherent growth. We saw that slow in 2023, 2024. As you start coming out of a market downturn, the first thing that happens in the core funds is they will start selling assets to prepare to start buying again. During 2025, what we have seen is as the market is starting to turn around, as we are seeing transactions starting to occur, that generally occurs in the core funds. The acquisitions, the transactions that are occurring are more the value-add, the opportunistic funds where they are buying early in the cycle.
The expectation is market will return, which will help with that growth. What we are seeing is when you see markets turn, that is when the new funds start. You see new funds starting up. You see not only new logos for us with new funds where they come to us or we are out looking for those customers to find them to start at the new funds, but it is also our existing customers that are starting new funds and growing with that. All of that feeds into our growth. We have seen that in spades in the past, over the past 15 years. We expect to see that again going forward. Layer on top of that is all of the new technology and analytics that we do as it allows us to get into the non-core fund or, sorry, non-open-ended fund space.
It presents a lot of opportunities with those other funds as well.
As a CEO, when I hear Rick talk, yes.
Yeah. I was going to say, I'm going to take that as a yes.
I'm excited because I love when Rick tells me this stuff. I think that the big thing is we are tracking things, and I get your point on the bookings piece. I think the most important thing is the backlog as well. I think that as the team and as we're selling things, we do need to keep track of what we're getting out there and what's getting on the platform. I think it's going to be inherently an important number for us to manage and help our customers get that on the platform sooner than later. That backlog piece becomes a pretty critical foreshadowing event for Rick's business.
Any rough dimensions you could give us on what the existing backlog is?
I don't. No. Easy answer. I think part of that, and this goes to a lot of the.
Yeah. I never walked into that.
A lot of some of the deals that have been signed over the past couple of years is it's those new funds that as the market starts coming out, they're waiting to do those transactions. In some cases, waiting for the capital flows to come in is that's some of the backlog that as we see things open up, all of that. We're happy to have them, even if it's a booking that hasn't yet translated into a revenue. We're happy to have them in as a client ready where when they're ready and the market is ready for them to start buying, we're there in place and ready to grow the portfolio with them.
I'm glad you got me on something. The last thing I put out there is I actually believe that at some point we're going to be doing this monthly versus quarterly. I think that as you have the power of the platform and the ability to see the information and see how this changes, that's a lot of value. That just, I think, will help make this market move a little bit quicker.
Especially in light of the new 401(k) changes, right? That could be a meaningful opportunity to increase frequency.
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Everything from the defined contribution side of it is just a whole nother part of the growth going forward as well.
Okay. I think we have time for one more question, and then I'll turn it over to you, Mike. I think we're good. I think we're good online. Mike, why don't we do some closing remarks and then we'll get you guys out of here.
Should we let them get off the stage?
Yeah. Yeah.
You guys.
Thank you.
I mean, you guys can sit up here if you want, but.
Yeah. Thank you.
I do not think I have a slide. Is there a slide? Oh, close. Oh yeah, there is a slide. There is always a slide. Listen, guys, and I use that as a colloquial term. Thanks for today. Thanks for paying attention. Thanks for coming. For all those people online, thanks for listening to what we had to say. There were a lot of folks that when I got to talk to everybody in and around November 6, they said, "Why are you running this?" The answer was, "Because we could." We did a lot of work looking at ourselves strategically over the last number of months. When you pull things apart and you think about things anew and you figure out what you are trying to do on that, it does not mean that you are just walking away from this business.
It means that you're thinking about how to make this business better and how you're trying to get more value out there. I hope you got a good sense today why we are so confident in the solutions that we're offering. It's not necessarily there's always things that you can do, and there's always a million things that this team is thinking about and what they're trying to do about it, but it's getting it out there, talking about it, and making it clear. For us, again, we've been saying it, we think we should be investing in ourselves. There's a lot of folks who want to invest with us. I'd say, "Well, come talk to us." At the same point, we feel like we have a good plan.
We're going to create a lot of value with that plan, and we're going to be doing that in a very quick period of time. As I end, I'll just give it very simply. I want to thank the board for the opportunity that I have. It's not a lot of times that you get to do a second act because people don't really like sequels. I actually think The Empire Strikes Back was pretty good. I guess I'm ruthless but kind, I was told. I think from the perspective of this, I think the team is ready for the next act. I also want to sit back and thank the folks who got us here. There were a lot of folks who are not in this room today who did get us here. I also want to thank Ray Mikulich for his time period.
He did a lot of work to get us into this spot. I get to take it from one space to the next, and it was a good time for that handoff. It is good to still have Ray as part of the board because one thing that Ray loves to tell our team about is, "What are we doing with these analytics, and can we actually get more out of them?" It is good to have him and our team from the guys on the board who come from the CRE industry really opening up the pace for us because from the standpoint, it is very easy to talk adoption, but they are helping us make that adoption easier. Thank you to the board. Thank you to the executive team, and thank you to you guys as investors, analysts. Happy to talk to you outside. Thanks for coming today.