A commercial property deal is worth pursuing when it passes five separate tests on documents, not on feel. At Axis those tests are the five Axis decision gates — the Income gate, the Lease-expiry gate, the Planning gate, the Price gate and the Exit gate. They sit inside the Axis Score System, and this is the first time we have published them by name. Each gate asks one question. Each comes back Green, Amber or Red. A Red on one gate is not averaged away by four Greens — that is what makes it a gate, not a line on a scorecard.
The usual assessment works nothing like this. The building looks right, the agent's numbers stack up, the suburb is "going ahead", the photos were shot at golden hour — and the mind starts furnishing the upside before a single document has been read. Optimism does the assessing.
The gates exist to take that job away.
The Income gate — is the income you are buying real?
Face rent is what the lease says. Effective rent is what survives once the incentives come out. Picture a three-year lease with nine months rent-free (an illustration, not a market claim): the headline yield is built on money the tenant never pays. On a Melbourne strip shop, that gap can be the entire margin. Deals die at this gate when the price is set off a rent that exists on paper and nowhere else.
The Lease-expiry gate — what happens when the lease ends?
Every lease runs out, and someone is holding the risk on that day. A single-tenant office in Melbourne's east with two years left to run is not really an income deal; it is a bet on one renewal conversation. The gate cuts the other way too. Buy a site to redevelop while the sitting tenant holds a five-year option, and vacant possession may never arrive — the "short" lease you discounted is the thing that owns you.
The Planning gate — does planning law allow what your price assumes?
In Victoria, zoning is the start of the answer, never the end of it. A Commercial 1 zoning still leaves plenty of uses needing a permit. A heritage or environmental overlay adds a second layer on top. Council's 60-day statutory clock resets when further information is requested, and a VCAT review adds months beyond that. So a buyer who prices a childcare conversion into an eastern-suburbs shop before reading the overlay has bought a planning case, not a property. This gate exists for exactly that price — the one that quietly assumes an approval nobody holds.
The Price gate — are you paying for something that does not exist yet?
Hope value is the classic kill. A growth-corridor site priced as though its permit were already granted makes the buyer pay twice — once in the price, and again in the approval risk they still carry alone. The gate puts the number against the evidence that exists today: settled sales and the income actually in place. Upside you have not created yet is not something you should be paying the seller for.
The Exit gate — who buys this from you?
Every hold ends. A purpose-built medical fit-out in a regional Victorian town might have two realistic buyers; that is not a market, that is a negotiation. The gate asks what has to be true, and by when, for someone to pay more than you did — and whether that buyer exists outside your feasibility spreadsheet.
Grading the evidence: A, B, C
A gate verdict is only as strong as what sits under it, so every input is graded. A-grade evidence is a primary document — an executed lease, a title search. B-grade is credible but second-hand. C-grade is an assumption, and it gets treated as a task rather than a fact: it is either upgraded to a document or it breaks the deal. The grading is the concept we publish; the scoring internals stay inside the Axis Score System.
Where you can run the gates
The five Axis decision gates are how every Axis Quick Scan is built. It starts from A$49.95, the deal is named against one of nine deal archetypes, and each gate comes back Green, Amber or Red with the reasoning attached. The Full report walks all five gates plus a feasibility read, and our team confirms every report before it ships. Nothing goes out as raw machine output.
The gates do not tell you how to feel about a deal. They tell you where it fails, in order, before your deposit is at risk — and they give you the evidence list to fix it if it can be fixed. This is independent decision support — not financial, legal, tax or planning advice — and capital questions go through licensed partners. It is the first move in the path Axis walks with every client: decide → prepare → deliver → connect.
A deal worth pursuing is one that clears all five gates on graded evidence; everything else is a story with a deposit attached.