CoStar Lease Analysis alternative

CoStar Lease Analysis is a modelling tool with exceptional data behind it. Its own words: “automatically calculates cash flow for new and existing leases”, with “Leasing Models, Powered by 7.3M+ Property Records” and a research operation that “prepopulates models, saving time and removing guesswork.” Its headline asks “Can Your Spreadsheet Do This?” — and the honest answer is no, your spreadsheet cannot.

But the question it is answering is “can this tool model a lease faster than Excel”, and that stopped being the interesting question. The slow part of lease analysis is not the arithmetic. It is getting the terms out of a 60-page executed lease and four amendments, correctly, before any arithmetic can start.

That is the part DealWise does. Drop the documents in, and it extracts the terms, builds the rent roll from them, models every month of the hold and gives a buy, hold or pass read with the clause it came from. On CoStar’s Lease Analysis page there is no mention of AI, machine learning or lease abstraction anywhere — the model is prepopulated with market data, not with your documents.

The documents are the input, not the output. A lease analysis is only as good as the terms that went into it, and those terms live in PDFs. DealWise reads the executed lease and its amendments, pulls the dates, the rent steps, the lease type, the TI and the options, and builds the rent roll from them. Nothing on CoStar’s Lease Analysis page describes reading a document.

It answers, rather than presenting. A model shows you cash flows. An answer tells you whether to sign, and shows the clause it relied on. Both sides matter — an AI verdict you cannot trace back to a lease is worth nothing, which is why the clause travels with the answer.

Lease analysis is half of it. The same rent roll drives full acquisition underwriting — NOI, DSCR, debt yield, break-even occupancy and IRR across the hold. CoStar’s Lease Analysis page does not describe underwriting a purchase.

You can try it without talking to anyone. The free plan takes no credit card and gives you one complete deal, modelled exactly the way a paid one is. CoStar’s page offers a demo request and no price.

CoStar is the narrower fit if:

• You are buying market data, and lease modelling is a bonus on top of it.
• Your firm already pays for CoStar and your inputs are already clean.

Choose DealWise AI if:

• The slow part of your week is getting terms out of executed leases and amendments.
• You want a recommendation with the clause behind it, not only a set of cash flows.
• You underwrite acquisitions as well as leases, and would rather one rent roll drove both.
• You want to test it on a real deal today, for free, without a demo call.

They answer different questions — CoStar for what the market is doing, DealWise for what this deal does. But only one of them reads the leases on the building you are actually buying, and you can test it on a real deal today without a demo call.