AVARI Capital Partners CIO Ben Coughlin recently sat down with Charles Stewart from Market Partners to walk through what we see the future of investment looking like and how we approach investments at AVARI.
Watch the full interview here https://youtu.be/wm_OCCUCIq0
June 26, 2026
In discussion with AusBiz about the opportunity Land Lease Communities offer as a pathway to home ownership and creating a unique investment opportunity.
Valuation sits at the foundation of the private credit market, allowing lenders to properly assess risk and return and give their own investors peace of mind that their money is in safe hands. But what should be a science is often more like an art – and there’s lots of bad art out there.
That’s because many valuations use historical rather than contemporaneous market data and are made with the assumption that assets can be sold or leased, given enough time. Then there’s the agency problem to contend with – valuers are naturally incentivised to provide a higher valuation.
“If the borrower has a default, the market isn’t going to look at the valuation from the point of view of what the neighbouring property sold for,” Alan Liao, founder and managing director of real estate fund manager and lender Avari Capital Partners, told The Inside Network’s Income and Defensive Assets Symposium.
The market is going to look at the economic value of that piece of real estate, and especially in development land that’s what you can potentially build on it and sell it for, minus the cost of construction and the profit of margin that requires for the developers. We spend a huge amount of time identifying the real economic value of the real estate – and most of the time it’s not what the valuation report says.”
That doesn’t mean a valuation sheet isn’t useful as a starting point – it’s just that it doesn’t give you the true, intrinsic value of the property. And that’s important when private credit is one of the hottest asset classes around and new managers are entering the space every day.
“A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing; that’s just the reality,” Liao said. “They wake up and think they can become a fund manager. A lot of the time it’s about telling a story rather than finding out what’s factual and what’s not. Many of them don’t have a thorough due diligence process, in fact many of them don’t have a due diligence process. And they’re lending against any random valuation they can get their hands on as long as it’s a nice story they can tell investors.”
Eventually, the market will take care of those managers that shouldn’t be in it. But until then,
investors will need to do serious due diligence of their own.
“Investors need to rely on their financial advisers, and we’ve raised most our monies through financial advisers,” Liao said. “They have the knowledge to tell good and bad managers apart. And then we open the due diligence sheet to advisers or potential clients and go through it item by item. And there’s hundreds of pages of information there. That way they know we put the work in.”
“The key thing that investors need to understand is the kind of work that’s being done, and that should be documented. Any decent manager will document their due diligence process so that it’s easy for an investor to ask for that documentation. Most managers don’t have that; it’s not about ‘it’s a nice location, it’s a good developer, they’re going to make lots of money’ – that’s all opinion. It’s not factual.”
Lachlan Maddock
Lachlan is editor of Investor Strategy News and has extensive experience covering institutional investment.
The AVARI Private Loan Income Fund (APLIF) has recently received a RECOMMENDED rating from renowned research house Core Property Research. APLIF which has returned over 10.8% since inception as of Sept 23 now features itself on 5 of the major private wealth platforms including Macquarie Wrap, Netwealth, Hub24, Praemium and Powerwrap to go alongside the independant research report. In the time since the report APLIF has also grown to over $140m across 18 investments.
Please see the research report below. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team – info@avaricapitalpartners.com.au
AVARI Capital Partners has recently won the Best Emerging Manager at the Annual Hedge Funds Rock awards night. Market leaders and distinguished professionals alike gathered for the annual awards night on the 14th of September. The night saw over 350 guests attend and over $250k raised across four charities.
The Fund which saw AVARI take home the award was their Diversified Credit Offering the “AVARI Private Loan Income Fund” (APLIF). This fund was launched in May 2021 and has offered investors consistent income of 10.8% p.a since inception. The fund has grown to over $140m with 18 current loans inside the portfolio. APLIF also recently received a Recommended rating from Independant Research House – Core Property.
If you would like to learn more about APLIF or other investment opportunities, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
A landmark office building in Wollongong has set a new benchmark after it sold for a record price of more than $50 million on Friday to private real estate investors Avari Capital Partners.
The office building, which is located in the centre of Wollongong on a corner block at 90 Crown Street, has 9172 square metres of net lettable area across seven levels and is currently leased by various government departments.
Sold on a yield of 7.75 per cent and a weighted average lease expiry of 3.5 years, the building is the first foray into the Wollongong market for Avari Capital Partners, of whom Jing Liao and Jie Li are the directors.
The sale was negotiated by Knight Frank’s Ben Mostyn, Tyler Talbot and Dominic Ong in conjunction with Travis Machan of MMJ on behalf of Castlerock, a privately owned company that specialises in developing and managing office buildings for the government sector.
“The sale demonstrates the attractiveness of the region for investors seeking premium commercial properties. We are continuing to see increasing interest from investors in Wollongong, particularly from offshore investors seeking higher yielding investments,” Mr Mostyn, Knight Frank’s head of Illawarra, said.
The previous office sale record was set when Sydney-based fund manager Folkestone sold nearby 43 Burelli Street to a wealthy offshore investor for $46.1 million in 2017.
MMJ’s Travis Machan said the building’s tenancy mix had been a drawcard. “Because it has retail as well as commercial, that assisted in a tighter yield rather than just a straightforward commercial building with office tenants,” Mr Machan said.
Wollongong was now on the radar of a lot of Sydney fringe-based tenants who had been priced out of Sydney’s CBD, but there was a lack of large office space available, according to James Mulcair, commercial leasing partner for Knight Frank Illawarra.
“The last major office building that was built in Wollongong was the ATO building about five years ago,” Mr Mulcair said. “The Wollongong CBD went with the tide of the residential apartment boom, but now that cycle has come to an end and commercial offerings are the flavour of the month.”
Plans have recently been approved for a 13,000 sq m building on Langs Corner, which is set to become the largest office building in Wollongong with construction expected to begin next year.
Original Article