Altus Group sells Development Advisory unit to Newmark
Altus Group has signed a definitive agreement to sell its Development Advisory business to an affiliate of Newmark Group, with the transaction expected to close on 1 September 2026. The divested unit comprises approximately 335 employees across Canada, the United States, Australia and Thailand, and will sit within Newmark's Management Services division under Peter Trollope, Newmark's global head of occupier solutions.
The deal follows Altus's sale of its Canadian Appraisal business to Newmark in March 2026, and Mike Gordon, chair and chief executive of Altus Group, described the transaction as completing the company's planned divestiture programme for the year. "It sharpens our focus on our market-leading valuation solutions, which we're enhancing with AI, analytics, data and market experts," Gordon said.
The deal
Alongside the asset transfer, Newmark has expanded its existing multi-year ARGUS Intelligence licence to include ARGUS Assist, the AI-powered conversational interface built into Altus's flagship CRE analytics platform. ARGUS Assist allows users to query assets or portfolios in natural language, with the system drawing on underlying models, workflows and data to surface insights. Roger Anscher, Newmark's chief administrative officer, said the tool means "complex analytical work that previously took days can now be surfaced in moments."
No financial terms for the divestiture were disclosed. Altus Group is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: AIF); Newmark trades on NASDAQ (NMRK).
Market context
The transaction reflects a broader pattern in CRE software and services: platform vendors are narrowing their portfolios around high-margin, recurring-revenue software while shedding professional-services arms that carry headcount risk and compress margins. Altus's two 2026 divestitures to Newmark are consistent with that logic, positioning the company as a pure-play analytics and software business anchored by the ARGUS suite.
ARGUS is one of the most widely embedded valuation and performance-analytics platforms in institutional real estate, and the expansion of Newmark's licence to cover ARGUS Assist signals growing enterprise appetite for AI-assisted workflows in asset management. Conversational AI interfaces layered on top of domain-specific data models are becoming a standard feature request among CRE and financial-services buyers, with several enterprise software vendors having launched comparable tools in the past eighteen months.
Competitive positioning
For Newmark, the acquisition diversifies its project management and cost advisory capabilities across geographies and asset classes, and gives the firm an internal population of users on which to pilot ARGUS Assist at scale. Development advisory services, which span capital investment appraisal, project delivery oversight and cost management for large-scale infrastructure, are a growth segment as construction pipelines remain active in the data-centre and logistics sectors.
Altus, meanwhile, narrows its operational footprint to software and analytics, where subscription-based revenue commands higher multiples. Investors will look for evidence of accelerating ARGUS Intelligence subscription growth and expanded ARGUS Assist adoption as the key near-term metrics, particularly given the competitive pressure from larger enterprise software vendors that are integrating generative AI into their own real-estate and asset-management modules.
The transaction's September close date leaves limited time for any regulatory review, suggesting both parties expect no material competition concerns in their respective markets.