When information about a commercial building reaches its owner, it has typically passed through multiple hands, with each transfer stripping away detail. Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, identifies this filtering as a primary reason owners and asset managers make decisions without the full picture. "It depends on how many filters get applied before a decision-maker gets it," Douglas said. The issue is not dishonesty but natural human behavior: people focus on the metrics they are measured and paid on. "They're not lying," Douglas said. "They're performing to what they're being measured for."
The pattern is familiar in property operations. A property manager requests information from a building engineer, who provides exactly what was asked, nothing more. The property manager then reports to an asset manager or owner, and the same filtering occurs again. Each person passes along only what they are accountable for. "Not that it's being massaged," Douglas said, "but it's being filtered." Consequently, corporate teams, especially asset managers, often build their own spreadsheets to recapture lost information. The data exists, but it is not reaching them in full.
Douglas, who has coached entrepreneurs for 30 years, highlights the difference between backward-looking and forward-looking key performance indicators (KPIs). Monthly financials show how a property performed but do not indicate 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 introduce new problems. When one person maintains the numbers, the information resides behind that person's login rather than with the company. When spreadsheets are emailed back and forth, the version someone reads may already be outdated.
The cost of this fragmentation becomes acute 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." Alternatively, the owner begins collecting data properly from that point forward, meaning the usable history starts on day one instead of reaching back years. Either way, gaps in operating data make a property harder to evaluate, potentially affecting both the timeline and the price of a deal.
Many companies respond by building dashboards around a handful of key metrics. Douglas acknowledges this helps but notes its 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." Douglas argues that real control 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 reveals what to fix.
With the full data set in one place, software can monitor for anomalies that humans might miss. Owners can set systems to flag anything outside its normal range over the past six months or several years. Different stakeholders—building engineers, property managers, asset managers, CFOs, and limited partners—can then view the same data through their own lenses. Douglas emphasizes that this is not 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 (Fast Company Press) and host of the Peak Property Performance podcast. OpticWise is a commercial real estate digital infrastructure and data strategy firm that helps owners and operators take control of their property data and technology.
