Spotlight: Buttonwood Due Diligence and Its ALTSeek Platform

The Littleton, Colorado, firm has written third-party reviews of alternatives sponsors since 2004 and now rates programs on three separate scores it declines to blend into one.

October 26, 2026

Buttonwood Due Diligence, based in Littleton, Colorado, writes third-party due diligence reports on alternative investment sponsors and their offerings for broker-dealers, registered investment advisors, and family offices. The firm was founded in 2004 by Dana Woodbury, a former director of due diligence at a national independent broker-dealer. According to the firm, its name comes from the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement that founded the New York Stock Exchange, and Woodbury's fourth great-grandfather, Augustine Hicks Lawrence, was the youngest of its signers.

The firm is now led by co-owners and principals Steve Ogrin, who joined in 2009, and Vince Brady, a Colorado-licensed CPA. The two longtime analysts bought majority ownership from the Woodburys in 2021. Derek Hayes, CAIA, is head of due diligence; before joining Buttonwood he was an associate director and due diligence analyst at Cambridge Investment Research, and the firm says he has reviewed several hundred products across real estate, private credit, private equity, energy, interval funds, and other structures.

How a Buttonwood review is insulated from the sponsor

Sponsors pay for Buttonwood reviews, and the firm publishes the specific steps it takes to keep that payment from shaping the result. A sponsor pays in full at the start of an engagement, so there is no outstanding balance to hold over the report. Drafts sent to the sponsor omit Buttonwood's conclusions. The finished report, with its opinions and recommendations, is posted to a password-protected Report Vault that the sponsor cannot access. Employees may not accept gifts or entertainment from sponsors, and may not invest in any program the firm has reviewed or expects to review. The firm also says it does not market or promote any specific offering.

Buttonwood says it aims to finish an offering review in roughly two to three weeks and a sponsor review in three to four, with faster options available. Fees are quoted per engagement after an initial read of the offering document. The operational due diligence review, which examines the sponsor entity rather than a single offering, covers background checks on management, succession and business continuity planning, internal controls and IT security, and the sponsor's prior performance across both syndicated and non-syndicated offerings. Site visits and management interviews are part of the review.

ALTSeek ratings: three scores, never blended

Buttonwood has rebuilt its offering around ALTSeek, a platform for advisors organized in four stages: Source, Evaluate, Implement, and Oversee. Its most distinctive piece is the ratings framework, which assigns each program three separate scores. The Analytical Profile Score runs from 0 to 100 percent and is the main driver of a program's tier. The Comprehensive Diligence Score runs from -100 to +200 and can turn negative when diligence turns up material concerns. The Failure Mode Resilience Profile, scored from 0.0 to 4.0, assesses how a program is likely to hold up under specific kinds of stress.

The firm does not average the three into a single number, on the reasoning that a strong profile paired with weak resilience would disappear inside a blended score. Programs fall into five tiers, from Comprehensive at Tier 5 to Specialized at Tier 1. Buttonwood states that a lower tier describes a more specialized or condition-bound profile rather than a weaker investment, and that certain DSTs and other purpose-built structures sit at the lower tiers by design. Ratings are presented as descriptions of a program's assessed profile, not recommendations.

Implementation and ongoing monitoring

The Implement stage has two parts. Affirm lets an advisor assign one-page investor education modules on an investment's overview, key risks, and general considerations, covering 11 investment types from DSTs and BDCs to oil and gas and life settlements. The investor attests to reviewing each module, which produces a time-stamped completion record for the file. Atlas is a subscription library of explainers, checklists, and practice tools. As listed on the firm's site in October 2026, Atlas has a free tier that includes the firm's catalog of full due diligence reports, an Explorer tier at $19 per user per month, and a Navigator tier at $49 per user per month that adds due diligence questionnaires for 11 asset classes and a sponsor monitoring workbook.

Sentinel, the Oversee stage, monitors programs a firm has already approved. It watches for trigger events in five categories: NAV and distributions, sponsor and key people, regulatory actions, market and sector stress, and structural events such as gate activations. Twice a year it re-screens the named principals behind each program for new regulatory and litigation history. A serious trigger event can prompt a review of the program's ALTSeek rating, which keeps a program's monitoring and its rating tied to each other for as long as the position is held.