Digest — Property Evaluation & Due Diligence

Property evaluation answers two distinct questions practitioners often conflate: what is it worth and what could go wrong with owning it. The first is valuation — a defensible point estimate of market value at a fixed date. The second is due diligence (DD) — a structured audit of legal, financial, physical, regulatory, and environmental risks that could destroy the valuation's underlying assumptions. A clean transaction requires both to converge: valuation sets the price ceiling, DD verifies that the ceiling still holds once latent issues are priced in. Sophisticated buyers express the linkage as a risk-adjusted bid: headline market value minus dollarised DD findings minus a contingency reserve.

Three methods anchor the discipline. Sales comparison (CMA) adjusts recent arm's-length comparables — the default for residential and vacant land. Income capitalisation and DCF convert net operating income to value via market-derived cap rates or explicit forecast — the default for commercial, industrial, hotel and build-to-rent assets. Cost approach and development residual value built improvements as land plus depreciated replacement cost — essential for special-purpose buildings and development feasibility.

The AU operating layer is statute-heavy and state-fragmented. Each state runs its own Torrens register, vendor disclosure regime, stamp duty schedule, land tax, foreign-acquirer surcharges and cooling-off rules. In Hong Kong, the Land Registry, Building Department BRAVO, Lands Department GeoInfo Map, and Centaline/Midland transaction databases are the canonical sources. The practitioner toolchain spans government registries (VicPlan, NSW Planning Portal, Queensland Globe), paid analytics (CoreLogic RP Data, Pricefinder, Landchecker), and AI-assisted workflows.

Full digest: digest.md · Glossary: glossary.md · Sources: sources.bib