tl;dr

Here's the best advisors to use for each category, assuming that money is not a factor (get to that Mr. Shakedown farming!):

  • Restaurant: Miracle
  • Retail: Miracle (obviously)
  • Entertainment: Miracle (obviously)
  • Pleasure: Pleasure King
  • Commercial: Marusa Marui

Real Estate Advisors

The Real Estate minigame in Yakuza 0 is described quite thoroughly in a number of places online, so I won't go into it in detail here. One component of the game is using "advisors" to improve the earning potential of the properties you've acquired. Each property is categorized into one of five categories, and each advisor has varying skills depending on the category: double-circle is best, followed by circle, then triangle, and finally X. The advisors also have a "star" rating, from 1 to 5, and it's the combination of those two stats which determine how much they'll help out any given property. Advisors also cost money to use, and that money cost might be factored in as well.

Here's a graphic with all the available advisors:

All Yakuza 0 Advisors, with Stats

The question is: which advisor is actually the best for each category? For Retail and Entertainment, it's easy since Miracle (the only 5-star advisor) has double circles in both of those. For the others, though, is it better to use a single-circle Level 5 advisor or a double-circle Level 4, for instance? In the early real estate zones, it hardly matters since their stats go up so quickly. Once you're trying to level up the Media King's properties, though, the gains are quite small, and it'll take a lot of cycles to get them all the way levelled up. Small differences between advisor performance can easily add up.

So, I did some savescumming on some A-level Media King properties and took screenshots after trying out the likeliest advisors. We'd get some more obvious screenshots from, say, C-level buildings, since they go up more quickly at the lower levels, but I didn't think to start collecting them until I was pretty far into the minigame. The results were a bit surprising -- most online guides recommend using either Miracle or Fortune-Teller for basically everything, but in my testing, Fortune-teller was never the best choice, and in one case the best advisor was a level 3!

Anyway, on to the aggregated screenshots:

Restaurant

Winner: Miracle

The highest-level double-circle advisor here is Mama-san, but in the end, she can't compete with Miracle's abilities. She does just as good as Pleasure King and Fortune-teller, though, so if you're looking to save some money, she's a good second choice.

Pleasure

Winner: Pleasure King

Pleasure King manages to ever so slightly eclipse Miracle, thanks to the double circle. Possibly the game artificially inflates Pleasure King's abilities for this property type, given the name affinity.

Commercial

Winner: Marusa Marui

This was probably the most surprising one. Miracle's only got a triangle in this category, so he loses out to a few Level 4 advisors. The breakout star here, ableit ever so slightly, is Marusa Marui! You'll need to zoom in on the image a fair bit to see that her bar is slightly further than the others, but there is a difference.

Retail and Entertainment

Winner: Miracle

I didn't actually bother trying to get screenshots of these. Miracle's the clear best fit here, having double circles in both.