What sits behind this service
Investment advice is only as good as the experience behind it. Lo Cheng has been in NZ commercial property for over 25 years. The career portfolio he has worked on exceeds $2 billion, including senior roles at Augusta Funds Management, Equinox Capital and Helius Therapeutics, before founding AssetPro in 2018.
That track record matters because real investment decisions are made under uncertainty, with imperfect information and asymmetric downside. Models are useful but they don’t substitute for having watched a market cycle, navigated a downturn, negotiated against the same brokers more than once, and held assets through the period where they looked like a mistake before they looked like a win.
Acquisition support
Buying a commercial property in New Zealand is a series of small decisions that compound. Pre-acquisition we work through:
- Lease review — is the income real or is there a tenant credit issue, a hidden break right, or an expiry concentration that turns the yield to dust on day 366?
- OPEX history — three to five years of actuals against budgets. Reconciliation patterns tell you who managed the asset.
- Building condition and seismic — engineers’ reports, %NBS rating, deferred capex.
- Contamination and the HAIL register — especially for industrial sites.
- Yield analysis — what’s the yield after stripping the optimistic vacancy assumption and the OPEX recovery gaps the vendor’s agent didn’t mention.
- Counterfactuals — what else could you do with this capital. The right answer is sometimes “buy a different building, not this one.”
Disposal strategy
Selling is harder than buying. Hold-versus-sell is rarely binary; usually the right answer is to time and prepare. We help with:
- The hold-versus-sell decision itself, modelled against current and probable lease, capex and interest scenarios.
- Preparing the asset for sale — tightening leases, finishing the OPEX clean-up, deciding which seismic upgrades to complete pre-sale and which to disclose.
- Selecting the right agent and the right campaign channel. Off-market, expressions of interest, deadline private treaty, auction — each has a profile, and the wrong one costs.
- Timing — not gospel, but real. The state of debt markets, valuer sentiment, comparable transactions, and your own portfolio context all factor.
Portfolio review
Once a year we run a portfolio strategy session — every asset, every lease. We review the portfolio against vacancy scenarios, CAPEX risks and OPEX inflation. We look at diversification across sector (office, retail, industrial) and geography. We highlight assets that have stopped earning their place in the portfolio.
The output is a decision list built in conjunction with the owner. With a specific number of options to consider over the next twelve months, with the rationale for each.
Asset repositioning
Sometimes the highest-NPV move is to change what the asset is. Tired office to refurbished. Strip retail to showroom. Industrial in the right precinct to small-scale data centre. Each repositioning has a cost and a consenting path. We are experienced with both and walk you through whether the cost outlay justifies the work.
What investment advisory doesn’t mean
Investment advisory at AssetPro is a defined service, and part of being clear about what it is means being equally clear about what it isn’t. We don’t broker debt, we don’t recommend loan products, and we don’t take a position on interest-rate direction. Those conversations belong with your bank or a registered mortgage adviser, and we’ll sit alongside you in them when it helps — but the call is yours.
We don’t value property. Registered valuers do that under the standards they answer to, and the integrity of the number depends on it. We don’t sell property either — that’s a licensed real estate agent’s role and there’s no commission tension in our advice as a result. What investment advisory is, end-to-end, is the work of helping an owner think through acquisition, disposal, hold-versus-sell, and repositioning decisions, with the experience to know which questions matter and the time to answer them properly.
Where we sit relative to brokers and valuers
We don’t sell — that’s a real estate agent’s role, and our advice should never carry the conflict that commission creates. We don’t value — that’s a registered valuer’s role under the relevant standards. What we do is sit on the owner’s side of the table when those decisions are being made, and bring the experience that turns a transaction into a strategy.
That positioning matters more than it sounds. When the broker is paid on a sale, every transaction looks like a good idea to them. When the valuer is appointed by the lender, the brief shapes the answer. When the lawyer is paid by the hour, complexity has its own gravity. The owner needs someone in the room whose only incentive is the owner’s long-term position. That’s the seat we hold.