# Insight — Property Evaluation & Due Diligence

> Single-page summary for the property evaluation and due diligence domain wiki. 
> This is an output artifact; for the canonical overview see [digest.md](../digest.md).

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.

Three methods anchor the discipline: **Sales comparison (CMA)** for residential and vacant land; **Income capitalisation and DCF** for commercial and income-producing assets; **Cost approach and development residual** for special-purpose buildings and development feasibility. The practitioner toolchain spans government registries (VicPlan, NSW Planning Portal, PEXA), paid analytics (RP Data/Cotality, PropTrack, ARGUS Enterprise), and environmental/climate risk portals (Victoria Unearthed, XDI, Coastal Risk Australia).

The AU operating layer is statute-heavy and state-fragmented with Torrens title, s.32 vendor disclosure, state-by-state stamp duty and land tax, and FIRB rules for foreign buyers. Hong Kong contrasts on every axis: deed-based registration (not Torrens), DMC governance, government leases, and BSD + AVD scale 2.

**Open research questions** cluster on climate-risk pricing convergence, build-to-rent yield benchmarking, AI-assisted CMA quality, and post-Holman vendor disclosure liability.

**Promotion hints** (from decision.json):
- Components 02 (DCF/cap-rate) and 10 (commercial lease analysis) are candidates for plugin extraction
- Component 11 (residential SPA) fits a procedural skill shape
- Component 07 (physical inspection) maps to a multi-step workflow with verification gates

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