System engineering, applied to real estate development.
Helio was founded by a technical team with deep institutional real estate experience — people who kept seeing the same thing: the optimal building on a parcel doesn't pre-exist. It has to be created, the joint solution of an interdependent stack of land, servicing, design, cost, the financing structure, unit mix and exit. A human can't afford to explore that space, so the industry collapses it early and lands far from the optimum. So we built a development company that holds the whole stack in one model and computes the answer.
The system isn't the product. The judgment it enables is.
A technical team that develops.
FIG. 01 / THE PRINCIPALSTwo founders — both technical, with deep institutional real estate experience. One structures the capital and the deal; the other leads the data science and the market read. Together, they are the firm.
Lloyd Liu
Co-Founder · CEOYale School of Management. A software engineer and former Merrill Lynch investment banker, now a principal at an institutional development fund, who has developed institutional real estate. The capital and development judgment behind the firm.
LinkedIn →Yuan He
Co-Founder · CTOUniversity of Pennsylvania; data scientist. He leads the firm's data science and market analysis — the quantitative read the development decisions are built on.
LinkedIn →How we operate.
Four commitments that hold across every project we develop.
We develop for a fee. The capital partner buys and owns the land and the building it becomes. We hold no equity.
We hold land, servicing, design, cost, the financing structure and exit in a single model and solve them together — the capability this whole firm is built on.
We don't run our own crews. We select the established builder with the record to deliver — and manage the development; they build it.
On the ground in HRM. The systems read this market specifically — not a generic model applied to it from somewhere else.