2/19/2026

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

Good day, everyone. Welcome to Altus Group's Q4 and full year 2025 financial results conference call. At this time, I would like to hand things over to Camila. Please go ahead.

speaker
Camila
Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, Lisa. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the conference call and webcast discussing Altus Group's fourth quarter and year-end financial results for the period end of December 31st, 2025. Our press release MD&A financial statements and the slides accompanying our prepared remarks, they're all available on our website. and as required, have been filed to Cedar Plus after market closed this afternoon. I'm joined today by our CEO, Mike Gordon, and our CFO, Pavan Chhabra. Before we get started, I wanted to point out a couple of things. As discussed at our investor day, beginning with our Q4 results, we have rolled out some of our new disclosures. To help investors and analysts rebuild their models under a new reporting format, we have published a supplemental document that shows the representation of our historic results. posted on the investor section of our website along with the other materials I referenced. Earlier this week, we announced the sale of our appraisal business in Newmark. This business has been moved under discontinued operations for our results. And accordingly, our results for continuing operations exclude the appraisal business revenue and adjusted EBITDA contribution. Also of note, we plan to eliminate the corporate cost line in our reporting at some point in 2026. Turning to our disclaimer slide, some of our remarks on this call and in our disclosures may contain forward-looking information based on certain assumptions and are therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the forward-looking information disclaimer in today's materials. We also use certain non-GAAP financial measures, ratios, total of segments measures, Capital management measures and supplementary and other financial measures as defined in National Instrument 52112. We believe these measures provide useful additional insight into our performance and they may assist investors in evaluating our shares. However, they are not standardized under the measures of IFRS and may differ from similarly titled measures used by other issuers and may not be comparable. They should not be considered an isolation or a substitute for IFRS measures. Further details are provided in our IR materials as well. And finally, unless otherwise noted, all percentage and basis point growth rates discussed on today's call are presented on a constant currency basis relative to the comparable period in 24. I would also like to point out that the supplemental document includes the majority of those numbers on an unreported basis. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Mike.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Camilla. And hello, everyone. Before we begin, there's been a lot of market discussion around how AI may reshape the software landscape. Let me take a moment to address how we view this at Altus and why we believe our position is well protected. From our perspective, AI reinforces our strategic direction and strengthens the advantages that already differentiate our business. In commercial real estate, valuation, accuracy, auditability, and trusted data are non-negotiable. These decisions influence significant capital deployment and involve robust scrutiny and fiduciary responsibility. Outcomes must be explainable, defensible, and grounded in high-quality data. That's precisely where Alta stands apart. So first, our solutions are trusted in CRE evaluation, to the point where quote, unquote, Argus it is commonly used as a verb in the industry. When a product becomes shorthand for the task itself, it signals our position in critical client workflows and market trust that goes well beyond the software features. Second, our strength is amplified by our network effects arising from significant value provided to our customers. Our valuation solutions are core to the valuation collaboration across investors, lenders, owners, appraisers, asset managers, and auditors. We are not just a tool used by one stakeholder. We serve as a platform that facilitates the creation, review, and use of valuation information by multiple stakeholders in the CRE industry. Every additional participant in this ecosystem reinforces the value of the platform for all others, and this is not something that can be easily replicated. Third, As AI evolves, our role becomes even more strategic. We are enhancing our agentic capabilities to do more than just generate insights, but rather perform critical actions within the valuation workflow. From data ingestion and validation to scenario analysis and recommendation engines, our platform will increasingly act as the orchestration layer that connects and coordinates every stakeholder in the valuation process. And finally, across the CRE ecosystem, Argus is the system of record for valuations. We support tens of thousands of users globally, stewarding valuations on portfolios and funds worth millions and billions of dollars in value. That scale creates proprietary data sets, historical context, and benchmarking depth that is extremely difficult to replicate via AI. When we at Altus think about AI, we don't see disruption to our model, but we see acceleration. AI systems are only as powerful as the data, the context, and the workflow integration behind them. Those are precisely our advantages. Additionally, with our strategic shift to asset-based pricing, we see ourselves as less vulnerable to the disruption risks associated with seat-based models. We also believe that our increasing use of AI internally has potential to unlock tremendous efficiencies. As we demonstrated at our investor day, the internal use of our valuation agent capabilities will free up our VMS experts time and significantly reduce manual work and focus on higher value tasks. We demonstrated how automating the valuation process can decrease the time to valuation by up to 90%. This is on top of AI deployment within our R&D teams, where increased use of AI coding will further optimize our R&D expenses, increase our speed of innovation, rapidly increase the value and the delivery of our products to our customers. Again, we see AI as the accelerator to our strategic efforts, not a threat. Now, turning to our full-year financial results, 2025 was a year where steady revenue growth and excellent retention reinforced the strategic importance of our solutions. Even in the softer market, we demonstrated that demand for our solutions remains resilient and driven by client needs, not market cycles. The team also demonstrated strong cost discipline and operating leverage. driving a 310 base point improvement in consolidated margins. As you'll hear from Pavan shortly, we see more opportunity to drive margin improvements in this coming fiscal year. We are also beginning to see the cash generation potential of the business come through, which gives us confidence as we look to enhance our capital return plans. The team executed well against our strategic initiatives, driving value for clients delivering innovation, and optimizing our corporate structure and capital allocation to unlock shareholder value. Upgrading Argus Enterprise clients to Argus Intelligence remained a major focus for us. We closed the year with the vast majority of our clients recontracted and are now turning our attention to driving deeper engagement on the platform and adoption of our add-on capabilities. On the innovation front, we bolstered Argus intelligence with benchmark manager and advanced valuation agent. For those of you who missed the demo, we have advanced our AI capabilities to make the valuation process faster, more accurate, and insightful. This is already being tested internally with our VMS professionals. AI complements the professional judgment of our evaluation experts, helping reduce their effort while at the same time increasing the amount of information used to reach conclusions. Our AI capabilities are quickly evolving from optimization and information analysis to more complex agent-led workflows for decisioning. We have a deep roadmap on continuing to enhance both agentic and decision-making AI and see a significant opportunity to drive efficiency and value for clients. We also deliver numerous featured feature enhancements throughout the year. As of note, we have been approved for a patent on the Altus Knowledge Graph, reinforcing the R&D investments over the past years. The Altus Knowledge Graph, which is built on our AI, enables us to connect disparate asset level data to form a common golden record using an Altus ID. It is a foundational component of Argus Intelligent, as we help our customers collaborate with each other and collate their data. Strategically, we're doubling down on the simplification of Altus, both through portfolio and organizational optimization, as we enhanced our capital allocation framework with a higher weighting towards capital returns. We kept the momentum going starting the year at an accelerated pace. We opened the year on a high note with some client announcements. I'm pleased to share that we now have Big brokers upgraded to Argus intelligence, including JLL, Newmark, and Cushman. And we are currently migrating their data to the platforms using our integration data solutions. We are also making meaningful progress on our portfolio rationalization. We announced the sale of the Canadian appraisal business and have a couple additional divestitures underway that we anticipate could close in the first half of 2026. including having recently signed an LOI for the Canadian Development Advisory Business. In addition to the AD&A segment, we have identified select non-core analytics businesses for potential divestiture. Our objective is to sharpen our focus and simplify the portfolio as we continue our transformation and prepare for a U.S. listing in 2027. On the cost side, we took decisive steps to streamline operations, reduce unnecessary layers, and align our cost structure with our future direction. Earlier this month, we initiated a restructuring program and other cost actions that will deliver millions of dollars in annualized savings. Alongside this, we implemented targeted go-to-market refinements designed to better support client needs and drive growth. These decisions are never taken lightly. but they are important to ensure we operate with focus and discipline. And then finally, we remain committed to returning capital to shareholders and announce that the Board approved an increase to our annual plans, giving us the flexibility to deploy up to $800 million this year. We can do this through a combination of various methods, including our NCIB and potential SIB tenders. We're evaluating methods to return up to an additional $450 million to shareholders within the first half of 2026. Our plan is to be in the market over the next 100 days returning that capital. We believe the current market environment presents an opportunity to allocate capital at attractive return levels, and our best investment continues to be on Altus itself. It's certainly been a busy period, but that pace reflects our ambition. We are moving with urgency and discipline because we see the real opportunity to create value. I'll now turn things over to Pavan to dive into our quarterly results. Pavan?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Mike. We close the year with momentum and disciplined execution. Recurring revenue continued to grow steadily, and we delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of margin expansion as operating leverage strengthened across the business. Turning to the analytics segment. we delivered another quarter of steady revenue growth and margin expansion. Performance was led by our flagship solutions, Argus Intelligence and VMS, which continue to drive strong customer adoption and renewal activity. Overall, software revenue grew 5.4% with Argus Intelligence delivering double-digit growth. As Mike noted, our portfolio optimization effort will streamline non-core products that are diluted to growth and retention, strengthening the long-term profile of the segment. Porter also included a heavier renewal mix toward the end of Q4, which can affect quarterly comparability, but doesn't change the segment's trajectory. VMS grew at 9.8% in the quarter, That result includes a one-time benefit from an operational efficiency that allowed us to complete the valuation work earlier than usual, shifting that revenue into Q4 on a go-forward basis. Excluding that shift, underlying growth was in the 5% range. Our margins expanded by 360 basis points in the quarter and 270 basis points for the full year. We finished at 33% adjusted EBITDA margins. reflecting the discipline in how we operate and the leverage we're unlocking as we scale, putting us in strong position as we work towards Rule 40 by end of 2027. The margin expansion reflects a combination of factors, revenue growth, ongoing portfolio optimization, enhanced delivery efficiency through our global service center, benefits from restructuring initiatives, and disciplined expense management. Turning to some of our recently introduced operating metrics for the analytics segment, all of our KPIs are trending in the right direction. Recurring revenue is up, software and VMS ARR were up, and our retention metrics remain strong. This reflects the durable high quality nature of our key recurring revenue streams. This quarter, we also rolled out our new disclosures across the P&L to better align our reporting with other technology companies. We're steadily progressing towards our target model and the improvements we saw in Q4 are encouraging. In particular, we're benefiting from the optimization of R&D and G&A, which will increasingly reflect the impact of our restructuring activities, product portfolio rationalization, the third party cost optimization. This quarter continued our pattern of strong cash generation with double digit growth driven by record conversion. As Mike mentioned, we're seeing the cash generation strength of this business come through consistently, which reinforces our confidence in our capital return plans. We ended the year with a very strong balance sheet, giving us the flexibility to execute those plans while maintaining financial strength. As discussed at our investor day, we believe the business can comfortably operate with modest incremental leverage over time, and we intend to progress towards our funded debt to EBITDA target of roughly two and a half times to support those returns. And finally, I'll wrap with an overview of our business outlook, which we're presenting on an organic basis for continuing operations only without the appraisal business. As you can see on this slide, we're expecting steady top line growth and sustained margin expansion. To be very clear, the constant currency growth rates represents our guidance, but we've also presented the indicative dollar range for easier comparison. The implied dollar ranges are based on our January FX assumptions, which are subject to fluctuations and will cause the dollar figures to differ from what we ultimately report. Our expectations are based on our target growth algorithm, which expects roughly 80% of the growth to be driven by volume and pricing and 20% by new logos. Adjusted EBITDA margin expansion is expected to be driven primarily by improved operating efficiencies and expense management, reflecting the actions we took this past month that Mike just discussed. Within that framework, we expect software to remain our strongest grower maintaining solid high single-digit growth. For VMS, we're not underwriting a market rebound. Our outlook assumes sustained growth consistent with current market conditions. And in data, we see opportunities to improve growth that we expect that progress to build over the next couple of quarters. Given the ongoing plans for other divestitures, we'll update our guidance throughout the year as additional transactions get completed. With that, Lisa, let's open up the line for questions now.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

Thank you. And everyone, if you have a question today, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from Erin Kyle, CIBC.

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking the questions. I first wanted to just ask on the guidance here. I just want to get some help comparing apples to apples and maybe For the full year guidance, I understand it excludes appraisals, but maybe can you help us understand where you expect the development advisory business to land from a revenue and EBITDA standpoint for 2026? I think most estimates at this point still include both the appraisals and development advisory.

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, it's a fair question, Erin, and great hearing from you. So as you noted, our guidance now is flipped to recurring and continued operations The continued operations drops out the analytics guide, which we move to discontinued operations. You know, those the divestitures that Mike outlined in terms of the non-core businesses and DA are essentially going to be an analytics company. So we're just getting ahead of it in regards to how we're formulating our guidance as it relates to the development advisory business. Historically, you've seen that as a combined segment. Appraisals represented about 30 percent of that number. Development advisory was about 70 percent of that number. And then when you break apart development advisory it was about it's about 70 percent North America and about 30 percent APAC. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of clarity in regards to how to compare it to how you guys have modeled it in the past in regards to just the overall revenue contribution to the total number. Yeah. Our plan in regards to guidance is as we sign definitive LOIs, we'll start moving these businesses over to discontinued operations, which will lead us to then recast our guidance to just help you guys continue to drive that level of clarity.

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Okay. And is that 70-30 split on both of revenue and EBITDA basis or just revenue?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so the numbers that I gave you were on the revenue component.

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Okay. And then on the adjusted EBITDA side, I just wanted to ask about some add-backs in the quarter. There were $17.5 million in other operating expenses added back. And maybe just to clarify what's included in there, I see $12 million allocated to corporate initiatives and strategic projects in the quarter. Maybe that specifically, if we could just expand on what's in there.

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

I'm sorry, Erin, did you say in the other operating category?

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Yeah, the other operating expenses in the adjusted EBITDA.

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so the other operating, as you mentioned, includes a host of different elements in it. Give me a second. We've got the some degree of transitional costs in that 18.5 related to some of our one-time corporate initiatives and strategic projects that we've run. We also benefited from about six and a half million dollars of realized and unrealized FX gains in Q4 of last year. And so, you know, that is obviously part of that $18.5 million higher on a year-over-year basis.

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Okay. That's helpful. Thank you, Pavan. And I'll squeeze one more in here, maybe for Mike. Just on the AI disruption risk, I appreciate you touched on it earlier on the call. I just wanted to expand on it a little bit in terms of, Some of the commentary we've maybe heard out of some of the larger real estate brokerages last week, just discussing ways to leverage their own proprietary data internally with AI. And I realized we did just see, you know, you signed a licensing agreement with Newmark for portfolio manager and benchmark manager as well. So maybe just how are you thinking about, yeah, some of your customers looking to go in-house with their own data?

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

So I think from the standpoint, we're not seeing that trend per se, Aaron. What we're being pushed on by our customers is with the value that they see in Argus intelligence is that they are wanting to get their data loaded into Argus intelligence so that they can collaborate with others more quickly. Um, I think that as we, we have very good, um, data protection rights for our customers. We do a very good job of curating their data and from the perspective of them, um, leveraging the solution. I think that they look at us as an extension of what they would see as in-house as well. So where, where you have like alignment is that we see that our, um, customers especially the ones that I mentioned, are eager to use the new concepts that we have and use some of the tools that we have, the AI tools. And we have a number of like what we would call white box and gray box AI tools that they can go ahead and leverage going forward as well. So I think we're looking at an extension to them versus just being in competition with them.

speaker
Erin Kyle
Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets

Okay, that's fair. Thank you. I will pass the line. Thanks, Erin.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

The next question comes from Paul Treiber, RBC Capital Markets.

speaker
Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Thanks so much. Good afternoon. I was hoping that you can dig a bit further into 2026 guidance, just for the 4% to 6% revenue growth. You mentioned a couple moving parts there were VMS versus Argus Intelligence. Can you just elaborate further on the growth that you expect for Argus Intelligence and the drivers of that, particularly with, you know, ARR was quite healthy this quarter, up 11%. You know, how do you see that translating into Argus Intelligence growth in 26?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, that's a great answer. I hope all is well. And so it's a great question. As you know, externally, we created the categories of software data services and VMS. software includes all of our software components. And so when I talk about high single-digit revenue growth, we're talking about all of the software categories, including Argus Intelligence and our other software categories. But if you were to break that apart and look at Argus Intelligence specifically, we are seeing great traction on there. You see that from the ARR growth rates, particularly high from a four-year perspective. It was very strong in quarter as well too. And so within the software category, we expect Argus Intelligence to be double digit growth within that paradigm with some headwinds from the other software categories as we continue to resolve those onto the platform over time. But very bullish in regards to the progress that we've seen in Argus Intelligence, both in terms of the ARR growth in the quarter as well as the continued strong retention metrics both on a gross and on a net basis. So very, very pleased with that progress. We have, I would say at this point, 80% of our Argus Enterprise ARR is sitting on Argus Intelligence. And, you know, we continue to move the needle in regards to moving more and more of our business to asset-based. roughly 40% of our business and Argus intelligence is sitting on asset base. And when you look at that from a total segment perspective, keep in mind, VMS is all asset based. So the percentage of our business that's sitting on asset base now is the lion's share of our revenue.

speaker
Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

That's helpful, thanks. The second question is just on, you know, previously disclosed the proportion of customers that have contracted to use the cloud and I think the vast majority. What proportion of those have actually migrated over to the cloud and where you can start mining or using some of that data for your analytics products?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so the majority of our clients are now sitting on Argus Intelligence and we're working very closely with our delivery teams, our services teams, and the clients to take provision those models that they've migrated over to be able to leverage the tools and technologies that are available to them through benchmark manager, portfolio manager. There is a degree of data cleansing that has to happen. It's really a change in user behavior in regards to hardening the data so that it can become referenceable and something that we can benchmark. And so there's a lot of effort in regards to working with our clients to resolve kind of this last mile element of getting their models ready for full benchmarking.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Paul, one other thing that we've done and just the when we talk about the patent that we just got, as we leverage the customer's information for them on Argus Intelligence, we're now doing it by asset versus by valuation. And so we're now building out probably a fuller view of that asset for those customers. And as a result, a view that is not only greater in the intensity of the data, looking at things, but also goes horizontally with time so that they can start looking at time series as well. So from this perspective, we think we're giving them a better 360 degree view of what that has done, not only today, but where it has been and where it's going.

speaker
Paul Treiber
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Thanks for taking the questions.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

Thanks, Ross. Gavin Fairweather from ATB Coremark has the next question.

speaker
Gavin Fairweather
Analyst, ATB Capital Markets

Oh, hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe we can just dig in on the go-to-market refinements that you referenced, Mike. I remember back in 2020 or 2021, the last time you did a bit of a go-to-market overhaul, it led to a pretty meaningful increase in sales productivity. So maybe you can just discuss the changes that you're making and what impact you'd expect that to make.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Sure. I think, and thanks for remembering that. It makes me feel good. The thing that we have is we've had historically a business that Even in analytics, the different parts of the business went together separately. So our VMS team, our software sales team, our data sales teams, while they try to coordinate, they did go and separately do things and their quotas and how we would pay them were really set up on their own opportunities. What we've changed and with us putting Rich Sarkis into the role of chief commercial officer, our entire suite evaluation solutions now go to market in one motion. Now, there's work to be done to make sure that that motion works in a consistent, coherent way. But what we believe is what we have is now instead of having maybe 60 software sales guys and a few guys looking at VMS and data, we have probably over 600 people in our organization focusing on the customer every day while they're acting either in the sales function, a customer support or customer success function, or just an account management function or delivery function. And so as we've done that, we've also focused on making them focus on the customer first, whether it's for their product or their solution, or something else. And so what we've seen, and we just ran our sales kickoff, what we've seen is, as we've been training these guys around it, it's not only talking about the value that their solutions bring, but how they can bring total solutions as customers are asking for it. And we're starting to see good pickup in executive sessions with our customers. Just like everything's happened to everybody over the last four to six weeks, we're seeing a lot of the mass questions on where we can fit in. And, and how we can help them solve some of the problems with their internal staff. So, um, I would look at it as we are, um, you know, it's, it's, it's easy to say that we're doing a consultative or value-based cell, but this, we see, um, those things really driving pretty well. And, uh, we have our connect conference happening in about, uh, maybe about, uh, just under two months from now. And we'll be, uh, uh, pulling that together even further for that conference.

speaker
Gavin Fairweather
Analyst, ATB Capital Markets

I appreciate that, Keller. And then maybe just on Argus Intelligence, can you discuss the shape of the renewal book through kind of 26 and 27 and where those renewals are stacked up?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, it's a great question. As you know, we went through a heavy renewal cycle last year, and we purposely, prior to last year, were signing up clients to one-year contracts so we can move them from seed-based to asset-based pricing. A majority of those clients now that have moved to asset-based pricing are now on three-year contracts. And so we have a smaller cohort this year of renewals than we did last year. And so a lot of that focus from a sales effort is really focused now on A, moving the seat-based to asset-based, and two, ensuring that we can continue a very strong motions on our cross-sell and up-sell opportunities into those clients.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Dave Kuntz, If I added on to that where where we when we were doing the analysis earlier this year, the. Dave Kuntz, Are are expected renewals this year will be down about 20% not because we're losing anything because as public said there they've gone to three year contracts and we would expect that to be down and like average out next next year as well, so the. Dave Kuntz, Getting back to the go to market motion that was talking about the team's got more time, focusing on. cross-sell or upsell opportunities with them, especially around the different product sets that we have.

speaker
Gavin Fairweather
Analyst, ATB Capital Markets

I appreciate that. And then just lastly for me, you know, thanks for the new disclosures. I guess the problem with putting out growth retention, net retention is that it opens up questions about churn. So maybe you can just discuss, you know, the primary reasons for churn and maybe you can talk about like what growth retention looks like if you just focus on the Argus business and then how you think you know, Argus intelligence could influence, you know, churn going forward as the customers take a broader suite of your solutions?

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

If I start, if I go to the churn on the Argus business, the Argus business has very little churn. Typically, we see gross retention in and around or above 95%. And where we get any churn is when you get down into, like if you think about our very long tail customers, where we get funds that come and go and they go and they leave, but we're very sticky with that. So that's pretty strong for us. Where we actually, in some areas around data last year, we saw a little bit more churn. And part of that is like, and this was a, we have a strategy to fix that. That business has typically been the feed the beast business. It's a very much market to the customers do work around that, and we're starting to see good impacts on that retention. And then if you get into the VAS retention, well, we talked about that at Investor Day. That's incredibly high retention in keeping current customers. That business, though, tends to have a lot of what we look at. We look at net upsell and downsell in that business. We rarely have any um churn does that help that's great thanks much thanks gavin next up is john shall td cowan

speaker
Unknown Analyst
Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. So could you tell us the pace of your margin expansion throughout 2026? Because it looks like you're going to start with 18% to 19% in Q1, and we'll finish the year with 25% to 26%. So that basically implies a much higher EBITDA margin, close to 30% by Q4. Is that a correct thinking?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, look, so that is correct. Again, as we talked about our guidance from a kind of midterm perspective at Investor Day, we talked about it in the form of Rule of 40. And that Rule of 40 was a combination of high single-digit revenue growth, which would then imply margins by the end of 2027 to get us to that Rule of 40. low to mid 30s in that range. And so the point of what we're what we're doing here is we're building a steady pace of improvement. Our revenue is going to continue to steadily improve, and we're taking direct actions to make sure that we're scaling our business appropriately with with with our growth to drive that margin expansion. And so we have a lot of confidence in regards to our margin expansion capabilities. Mike referenced the fact that we did do some actions in regards to just making sure that we continue to remain in fighting shape as we right-size the business. It's just good hygiene work for us, but we're gonna get the full year benefit of the work that we've done in 2025 into 2026, which will help us get to those measures that you're talking about. So you're thinking about it in the right way. We should see a steady progress um, throughout 2026 to get us to what we talked about at investor day for, for 2027.

speaker
Unknown Analyst
Analyst

And then thanks, uh, thanks for the color and back to the rule of 40, how much of your rule of 40 target by 27, it depended on a broader market recovery in terms of the macro, any updates since last investor day, do you still think, you know, 2026 will be a key year for some recoveries?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Stapp, Yeah, you know, as I mentioned, our, our, our guide is not underwriting a market recovery and my refers to this often with the board. Stapp, You know, we're going to have good growth in a down market and we're going to have great growth in an up market. Stapp, And and so, you know, as we think about our guide and and its correlation to the market. Investment decisions are being highly selective now while dry powder is up, transaction activity is up. We're seeing a greater degree of selectivity and that plays right into our strength in regards to helping our clients ensure that they are managing risk appropriately and driving performance and investing in the most profitable and highest return assets. You know, we built a plan and we're executing around a plan where we're going to continue to see steady growth in any market. And if the market has significant tailwinds, then we should have great growth. But we're confident in our path right now in any market.

speaker
Unknown Analyst
Analyst

Thanks. Maybe one last question. Question from me on AI. So if you're going to roll up more GenTech AI features, how should we think about, you know, number one is the pricing of these additional features and maybe number two, could you talk about the impact on your margin profile? Because my understanding is that tokens from some of the frontier models can be quite expensive.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

That's a fair question. So there's two ways that we look to do this. And just in some of the experience I've had with it, We'll roll it out in a in a in a method that it is it runs by itself or it runs alongside human intelligence. And so depending on how they use it, they can use it to support or they can use it to provide reports on that. And on that, the key thing that we need to make sure is when we run this is we need to understand the cost to run that based off of the compute power that we have. So, you know, as we've looked at this, we've looked at what those costs look like and what those loads look like. So we have a pretty good sense of how those things will run. And we feel like those will be, from a gross margin perspective, you know, as profitable as some of our other lines of business when it comes to Argus Intelligence.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

We'll take the next question today from Richard Say, National Bank Capital Markets.

speaker
Richard Say
Analyst, National Bank Capital Markets

Yes, thank you. In the outlook section, you sure talked about 80-20 sort of growth from volume pricing and then new logos. How does that mix change under different market conditions for commercial real estate?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, look, we've got a tremendous opportunity from a cross-sell and up-sell perspective as we continue to roll out new features and functionalities in our product suite, which gives us that opportunity both from a pricing perspective. New logo, we've been certain about 20% of our growth in new logo. There's a lot of efficiencies that we've built within the business to be able to deliver our solution at a better cost point for us, particularly in VMS as we're leveraging a lot of the technology that we're rolling out to the clients where the beta customers internally to adopt those solutions. And so that is giving us the opportunity to expand our VMS from tier one into tier two opportunities to continue to capture the new logo opportunity. But we've got a large base of clients. We've got a whole new suite of offers that we can bring to those clients. That's going to give us that opportunity from a pricing perspective and from a volume perspective, they would drive more into existing relationships. The team selling the full portfolio of solutions plus our scalability from a cost perspective allows us to go after white space and new clients as well.

speaker
Richard Say
Analyst, National Bank Capital Markets

Thanks. And just your perspective kind of on the market in general, like if you had to sort of rate it on a scale of one today in terms of the market conditions for Alta specifically, like where do you think we are right now?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, look, I can give you kind of my thoughts on market sentiment, but there are views that people can talk both sides of the coin on. We've seen rate volatility is eased, but trade policy regulatory uncertainty continues to weigh on sentiment. Transaction activity, we did see improvement through 2025. It's fully expected that the transaction activity is going to continue to be good in 2026. But the recovery is uneven across asset types. You're seeing multifamily and industrial continue to lead. Retail is stable and offices bifurcated between prime space leasing and some of the older commodity stock that continues to reprice. I mentioned we've got near record levels or dry powder that continues to build. But there's going to be a lot of selectivity in regards to how that capital is deployed in the markets. And that's where it's a tailwind for us. It's a very strong opportunity for us to really help the CRA industry maximize the performance and effectively manage the risk and make better and more informed decisions. And so this market environment plays to the strength of exactly the value proposition that we're selling to our clients.

speaker
Richard Say
Analyst, National Bank Capital Markets

Great, thanks. And just one last quick one for me. With respect to other potential non-corp divestitures specifically in analytics, can you maybe help us understand a little bit, you know, what may be considered non-corp is, you know, in terms of trying to value the stock, you know, we sort of want to see what a run rate business looks like here going forward.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think, listen, there's not a lot where we would have this in analytics, but just to be very straightforward, we are in the valuation space. And so as we look at like what we do, anything seen, you know, any of the products that we have Argus branded to or some of the new products that we've had and we're putting out there are the analytics based products and our workflow. Those are all very much in the valuation space and helps in that platform. That also includes the data that we include and ingest into that platform. as well as clearly our VMS team. We look at them as the guys who really get a lot of activity on that platform. If it's a couple steps removed, it starts to be something that we will be looking at and deciding, does it make a lot of sense to keep it? But there's not going to be a lot of things there. But we just are, as part of like the review that we started when we talked about it in Investor Day, we're still continuing on that. And there'll probably be a couple of small items that we'll move on.

speaker
Richard Say
Analyst, National Bank Capital Markets

Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

As a reminder, press star 1 if you have a question. We'll go to Steven McLeod from BMO.

speaker
Steven McLeod
Analyst, BMO Capital Markets

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Um, I just had, I had a couple of questions just regarding the, the guide given, uh, you know, the, the, the, uh, the new reporting and, um, and some of the, uh, um, some of the changes to, uh, to the reportable segments. Um, you know, just, just quickly first on, on the development advisory business. So you've signed an LOI, but it's not, but it's, it's, it's still included in the guidance. Is that right?

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Let me answer that. That's right. That is actually, and it got put. Steve Monowitz, As we talked about it, it's an italics we just got that done so. Steve Monowitz, As we were announcing things Stephen I think we wanted to be a little conservative on that, but our belief is that that will be done, hopefully, more or less by the next 60 to 70 days.

speaker
Steven McLeod
Analyst, BMO Capital Markets

Steve Monowitz, Right okay okay that's that's that's helpful and then just just on the on the advisory or for the appraisals business breakdown. Pavan, did you say it's roughly 30% of the underlying AD&A business?

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. That's correct. About 70% of the previous development, the AD&A number was about 70% appraisals. I'm sorry, 30% appraisals, 70% development advisory. And within Development Advisory, North America represents about 70% and APAC represents 30%.

speaker
Steven McLeod
Analyst, BMO Capital Markets

Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

speaker
Camila
Head of Investor Relations

That's helpful. Okay.

speaker
Steven McLeod
Analyst, BMO Capital Markets

I saw that in your disclosure. That's helpful. And then maybe just finally, you know, just on now the pre-IFRS 16 basis that you're reporting EBITDA, Would you expect your occupancy costs to change much heading into 2026, given some of the cost-saving measures that you've began implementing in 2025? Yeah.

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Look, I mean, we, you know, as we stated on numerous occasions, we, you know, we do have a wide, real estate footprint that we're rationalizing as we continue to simplify the business. And so we would expect that to continue to lower as well too.

speaker
Steven McLeod
Analyst, BMO Capital Markets

Right. Right. Okay. Okay. That's great. A lot of my other questions have been answered. Lots of great color. So thank you.

speaker
Pavan Chhabra
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Appreciate it.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

Well, and I'll take a follow-up from Gavin Fairweather, ATB Cormark.

speaker
Gavin Fairweather
Analyst, ATB Capital Markets

Thanks for the follow-up. Just on capital allocation, you indicated an amount that you'll look to deploy in the first half above and beyond what you've already done. With 800 done, you know, you've left yourself with some additional kind of capacity and room for the back half. I guess I'm just curious kind of under what conditions you'd like to become more aggressive in the back half of the year and increase the amount of capital returns?

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

I think for us, it's going to be something that as we will continue to watch the market, we'll continue to watch the sentiment. And, you know, we believe we have good value in what we're doing and we will get there fairly quickly. I think that, as we said, we're going to deploy a good portion of that in the first half. I think depending on how the instruments that we use are taken up, that will be dependent upon how we start to deploy in the second half and when we deploy. I think if the market remains a little choppy, or similar to as we've seen it, we think that that's still a great buying opportunity for us. And so then we'll continue to leverage that. Thanks so much.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

And everyone, at this time, there are no further questions. I'd like to hand the conference back to Mr. Mike Gordon for any additional or closing remarks.

speaker
Mike Gordon
Chief Executive Officer

Well, I would just want to thank everybody for getting on the call. It's been a pleasure to talk to all of you, and thank you for the questions. As we talked as a team here, we're excited about the opportunities for this year, and we're getting to work. So looking forward to talking to you all coming forward in the next couple months. Have a good night.

speaker
Lisa
Conference Call Operator

Once again, everyone, that does conclude today's conference. We would like to thank you all for your participation today. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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