# 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 for location, size, condition, time-of-sale and special considerations — the default for residential and vacant land. **Income capitalisation and DCF** convert net operating income to value via market-derived cap rates, or via explicit forecast and reversion — 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, or back-solve land value from gross development value less construction, finance, profit and contingency — essential for special-purpose buildings and feasibility on development sites. IVS, API, RICS Red Book and USPAP define report shapes; HKIS governs Hong Kong practice. Valuers triangulate at least two methods and reconcile to a single figure.

The practitioner toolchain spans government registries, paid analytics, and AI-assisted workflows. **PEXA** and **CoreLogic RP Data** dominate AU e-conveyancing and sales analytics; **VicPlan, NSW Planning Portal, ePlanning Spatial Viewer, Queensland Globe** surface zoning and overlays; **Landchecker, Pricefinder, PriceHub** aggregate title, sales, and planning into one buyer-facing dashboard. The **APRA, ATO, ABS, RBA** publish macro data; **EPA, Bushfire Prone Mapping, Coastal Risk Australia, Climate Valuation** address environmental risk. In Hong Kong, the **Land Registry, Building Department BRAVO, Lands Department GeoInfo Map, Centaline / Midland transaction databases, and Rating and Valuation Department rateable value lookup** are the canonical sources.

The AU operating layer is statute-heavy and state-fragmented. Each state runs its own Torrens register, vendor disclosure regime (Vic s.32, NSW Vendor Disclosure, REIQ contract), stamp duty schedule, land tax, foreign-acquirer surcharges and cooling-off rules. **Section 32, FIRB approval, building/pest inspections, strata reports, planning overlay searches, contamination history and bushfire/flood mapping** are non-negotiable DD items. Hong Kong contrasts on every axis: deed-based registration (not Torrens), DMC governance, government leases, BSD + AVD scale 2, and UBW/slope orders that can void title insurance.

For new practitioners, read components in order — valuation methods (01-04) → AU legal/physical/environmental DD (05-08) → financial and lease DD (09-14) → transaction execution (15-18) → AU statute layer (19) → HK comparative track (20-22). Open questions across the wiki cluster on **climate-risk pricing convergence**, **build-to-rent yield benchmarking**, **AI-assisted CMA quality**, and **post-Holman vendor disclosure liability**. The accompanying `tools.md` is the practical artifact; `glossary.md` indexes 240 deduplicated terms; `sources.bib` aggregates 314 unique authoritative sources.