Experience

Jones Lang LaSalle Capital Markets Team: Office investment underwriting and ESG due diligence

Key Contributions

  • Screened 22 cities across four investable regions against client preferences, preliminary budgets, market liquidity, and institutional-grade office stock. Narrowed the search to 20 assets in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu.
  • Developed a GRESB-informed desktop screen with approximately 40 ESG and operating indicators, coordinating with JLL's internal ESG team. Flagged environmental, operating, and capital-expenditure concerns that excluded approximately 40% of candidates before full valuation and due diligence.
  • Structured diligence across management, performance, and development: ownership and SPV transparency, policy coverage, compliance, safety, and 12 months of continuous operating records. Benchmarked energy, carbon, water, waste, certifications, and upgrades against comparable properties matched by city, submarket, vintage, and building systems.
  • Assessed upgrade, refurbishment, and extension risks through capital-expenditure and cash-flow analysis. Used equipment age, chiller efficiency, building-management systems, sub-metering, air monitoring, and maintenance records as proxies where utility data were unavailable. Converted findings into red, amber, and green signals and asset-specific diligence priorities.
  • Underwrote shortlisted properties using discounted cash flow, replacement cost, and comparable transactions, incorporating operating conditions and upgrade requirements into valuation assumptions, cash-flow scenarios, and exit-risk assessments.
  • Built ten dashboards in Excel, Python, and Tableau to compare market fundamentals, valuations, ESG indicators, and scenario exposures across cities, assets, and the investment pipeline.
  • Led bilingual briefings for capital-markets leadership and client managers, shaped site-visit sequencing and ESG questions, and delivered standardized asset books covering tenant concentration, weighted average lease expiry, vacancy, rents, operating costs, valuation models, and diligence findings.