Commercial real estate owners often make critical decisions based on incomplete information, according to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise. In a recent discussion, Douglas highlighted a pervasive issue: data about a building’s performance gets filtered as it moves up the chain of command, leaving owners and asset managers without the full picture.
“It depends on how many filters get applied before a decision-maker gets it,” Douglas said. The filtering process is not malicious, he notes, but a natural consequence of how information is requested and reported. A property manager asks a building engineer for specific data and receives only that. The property manager then passes along what they are accountable for to an asset manager or owner. “Not that it’s being massaged,” Douglas said, “but it’s being filtered.” He emphasizes that people are not lying; they are performing to the metrics they are measured and paid on. If a number looks bad, it may not make the report.
The result is that corporate teams, especially asset managers, often build their own spreadsheets to recapture the lost information. The data exists, but it is not reaching them in full. Douglas, who has coached entrepreneurs for 30 years, points to the difference between backward-looking and forward-looking key performance indicators (KPIs). Monthly financials show how a property performed, but they do not show how to change future outcomes. “If I want to change the NOI, if I want to change the utility expenses, what’s the data that will actually make it change going forward?” he said. “I can’t change my financials until I look at the inputs.”
Homegrown spreadsheets create additional problems. When one person keeps the numbers, the information lives behind that person’s login rather than with the company. When spreadsheets are emailed back and forth, the copy someone is reading may already be out of date. The cost becomes clear during a sale or financing. A buyer’s or lender’s diligence team asks for the operating history behind a figure, and the honest answer is that it sits on someone’s laptop. “Anything can happen. Bad optics,” Douglas said. “Most commonly, people stop pursuing it.” Other times, the owner starts collecting data properly from that point forward, meaning the usable history begins on day one instead of reaching back years. Either way, gaps in operating data make a property harder to evaluate, affecting both the timeline and the price of a deal.
Many companies respond by building dashboards around a handful of key metrics. Douglas says that helps but has limits. A person can realistically track six to 12 measures, while a building produces far more information. “Someone builds a dashboard around it, and they think they have control of everything,” he said. “All they have is visibility of the KPIs. That is not control.” Real control, he argues, comes from access to source data. “Aggregated data tells you what happened. Source data helps you understand why,” he said. A benchmark might show a property ranks in the 40th percentile for energy use, but only the operating data shows what to fix. With the full data set in one place, software can watch for anomalies people can’t, flagging anything outside its normal range over time. Different stakeholders—from building engineers to CFOs—can then see the view they need from the same data. Douglas is clear this isn’t about replacing staff. “Your property still needs that many property managers,” he said. The value comes from efficiency and from decisions based on complete information rather than filtered reports. More on this approach is available on the OpticWise blog. Douglas is co-author of the best-selling book Peak Property Performance®: Game-Changing AI and Digital Strategies for Commercial Real Estate and host of the Peak Property Performance podcast.
