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In the mid-1990s, when Percy Weatherall was CEO of Hongkong Land and Michael Smith was a junior property cadet at Jones Lang Wootton, Weatherall offered Smith a job. Smith turned him down as he was already committed to UBS in Sydney. Weatherall, Smith recalls, “wasn’t very happy. I don’t think he had many people say no to him.”

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Three decades later, Smith sat in that same corner office, newly installed as the company’s CEO. At his welcome dinner, he tracked down Weatherall and reminded him of the episode. The former boss had forgotten it entirely.

Hongkong Land is one of Hong Kong’s most storied developers. Founded in 1889, it’s the largest commercial landlord in Hong Kong’s Central district, owner of 4.8 million square feet of prime office and retail property in the city’s commercial heart: Exchange Square, home to the stock exchange; Jardine House, with agovernment-protected harbor view; and the Landmark retail complex.

But now, Smith is trying to loosen the ties between Hong Kong and Hongkong Land—a big step for a company that, literally, is named after its home city.

“Hongkong Land has always been a proxy for Hong Kong’s office rents,” Smith tells Fortune in an extended interview at the company’s Central headquarters. “When we looked at historic office rental cycles and our share price, it was like 90% correlated. Everything else we did as a business didn’t matter to investors.”

Smith’s assignment, set by Jardine Matheson, which controls just over 50% of Hongkong Land’s shares and is itself deep into a transition from conglomerate to capital allocator, is to turn the landlord into something closer to a fund manager, bringing in institutional co-investors to expand the company’s footprint across Asia’s gateway cities—and not just Hong Kong.

Transforming a 137-year-old developer

Hongkong Land was founded in 1889 by Catchick Paul Chater, a Calcutta-born British businessman of Armenian descent, and James Johnstone Keswick, the taipan of Jardine Matheson. Six days after the company’s founding, Chater persuaded the colonial government to reclaim 65 acres of new waterfront. Today, Alexandra House and Prince’s Building, as well as the Jardines-owned Mandarin Oriental hotel sit on that reclaimed land.

Chater was also a key figure behind the founding of the Hongkong Electric Company, Dairy Farm, and Wharf, some of the earliest pillars of what became Hong Kong. Several streets and buildings still bear his name.

“Paul Catchick Chater is responsible, more than any other single individual, for dragging Hong Kong into the twentieth century,” says Vaudine England, a journalist-historian and author of Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong. “Chater shaped Hong Kong, both literally in redrawing the waterfront, and culturally, through his patronage of everything from gardening societies to the University of Hong Kong.”

Hongkong Land is now owned by Jardine Matheson, one of Hong Kong’s largest conglomerates and No. 449 on the Fortune Global 500. Jardines consolidated its control of Hongkong Land in the 1980s, following an era of aggressive expansion that left the developer overextended.

A 1978 photo Trevor Knight of Hongkong Land pointing to a building model that eventually became the Landmark retail complex.Robin Lam Kit—South China Morning Post via Getty Images

Jardines needed someone to rehaul Hongkong Land, and so it went to Smith, a long-time investment banker with stints at UBS and Goldman Sachs, where he spent years building Asia’s real estate investment trust industry. He later became regional CEO for Europe and the United States at Mapletree Investments, Temasek’s Singapore-based real estate arm.

He sees Singapore’s real estate market a a model of capital discipline that Hong Kong’s developers, including Hongkong Land, largely lacked.

“Hongkong Land was trading at an 80% discount to net asset value,” he points out.  “Incredible assets, obviously worth a lot more than 20 cents on the dollar, with a great brand, but potentially not as progressive as some of the Singaporean companies.”

Six months after joining Hongkong Land, he put forward a plan to wind down its residential build-to-sell business; divest non-core assets; and reduce the company’s exposure to any single geography to below 40%.

“When I joined, we had 50 to 60 projects across Asia—many across China, Cebu in the Philippines, Indonesia, all over the place—and we didn’t have scale in any market,” Smith recalls. Residential development, he decided, had to go. “You’re so subject to external factors. We bought land in Singapore just before the government increased the stamp duty from 30% to 60%. That kills your feasibility.”

Earlier this year, Hongkong Land launched the Singapore Central Private Real Estate Fund (SCPREF), with assets under management of 8.2 billion Singapore dollars ($6.3 billion). The fund holds Hongkong Land’s stakes in Marina Bay Financial Centre Towers 1 and 2, One Raffles Quay, One Raffles Link, and