We run every deal through four stages and five gates, and we publish both. The stages are decide, prepare, deliver, connect. The gates are Income, Lease-expiry, Planning, Price and Exit. What we do not publish is how the gates are weighted and scored. That line is deliberate, and this page says exactly where it falls.
Most advisers describe a process. Few name the tests. Fewer still say what they keep back. We would rather you read the method, argue with it, and then decide whether to engage us.
The ladder: decide, prepare, deliver, connect
Each stage answers one question. You can stop after any of them. Most clients do.
Decide asks whether the deal is worth doing at all. This is the Strategy engine, and it is where the five gates run. Prepare asks whether the thing you decided on can actually be approved and funded. That is Pivot — planning pathway, conditions, consultants, the statutory clock. Deliver asks whether it can be built to the plan you priced. Connect asks who else the project needs: capital, a partner, a buyer, a consultant team. That is Match.
The order matters more than the names. Most money is lost when a project skips a rung — when a site is bought on a decide-stage assumption that the prepare stage was going to break anyway. The ladder exists so a weak deal fails early and cheaply.
The five gates, and what each one tests
The gates run inside the decide stage. Every Axis Quick Scan puts a deal through all five. We published them by name a fortnight ago, and nothing has changed since.
The Income gate. Is the income you are buying real? Face rent, effective rent and what a tenant actually pays are three different numbers.
The Lease-expiry gate. What happens when the lease ends? A short tail can be a risk or the whole opportunity, depending on what you intend to do with the building.
The Planning gate. Does planning law permit what your price assumes? Zone, overlay, parking and use all sit here.
The Price gate. Are you paying today for something that does not exist yet? Value uplift that depends on a future approval belongs to whoever takes that risk.
The Exit gate. Who buys this from you, and on what evidence? An asset with one plausible buyer is priced differently from one with many.
How the evidence is graded
A gate is only as good as what it was answered with. So every answer carries a grade.
A is a primary document — the lease, the title, the permit. B is a credible secondary source, such as an agent’s statement or a settled comparable. C is an assumption, clearly labelled as one.
The grade travels with the finding. A gate answered entirely on C-grade evidence is not a pass. It is a list of things to go and confirm, which is often the most useful output a scan produces.
What we publish, and what we do not
Everything above is public on purpose. You can take the ladder and the five gates and run them yourself on your next deal. We would rather you did that than hire anyone on trust.
What stays closed is the scoring layer: the weight each gate carries, the thresholds that separate one band from another, and the rubric that turns graded evidence into a number. That is the part competitors would copy and the part that took real work to calibrate. Naming a framework is marketing. Publishing its internals would simply give it away.
This also means we report a band rather than a bare score in published work. The band is what a decision turns on. The digit behind it belongs inside the system.
What happens when a gate fails
A failed gate is not a no. It is a named thing to go and settle, and the report says who settles it, what document would settle it, and what the answer would have to be for the deal to keep its price.
Most failures resolve into one of three outcomes. Sometimes the evidence simply is not there yet, and the answer is a short list of documents to obtain before anyone commits — a lease, a title search, a planning certificate. Sometimes the evidence arrives and the deal is genuinely different from how it was presented, which changes the price rather than killing it. And occasionally a gate fails in a way no document will fix, because the thing the price assumes is not permitted and never was.
We report the band the deal lands in, not a bare number. A band is what a decision turns on. Two deals can share a digit and need completely opposite responses, so the digit on its own is the least useful thing we could hand you.
Common questions
Can I run these gates myself? Yes. The five gates and the evidence grades on this page are the whole structure, and nothing stops you applying them to your own deal. What you will not have is the weighting, so you will reach a judgement rather than a score.
Why publish the method at all? Because a method you cannot inspect is a method you have to take on trust, and we would rather be argued with than believed. The scoring layer stays closed; the reasoning does not.
Does a passing score mean the deal is good? No. It means the deal survived the tests we run on the evidence you gave us. A gate answered on assumptions passes differently from one answered on primary documents, and the report says which.
What this method cannot do
It is decision support, not advice. It does not replace a valuation by a certified practising valuer, legal advice on a contract, or tax advice on a structure. Where a decision turns on the figure itself, that work belongs to licensed advisers and we say so in the report.
It also cannot see what you have not given it. A gate answered from an agent’s summary instead of the lease is a C-grade answer, and it will say so.
Where each framework runs
The gates run in Strategy. The permit pathway runs in Pivot. Counterparties and consultant teams run in Match. The same record carries through all of them, which is the point of the ladder: decide, prepare, deliver, connect, without re-explaining your project at each step.
If you want to see the gates applied to a real deal rather than described, the New Lambton case study is one we lost money on by sending the client away, and it is the clearest illustration of what a gate failure actually looks like.