When commercial real estate owners and asset managers receive property reports, the information has typically passed through several hands, with each transfer stripping away detail. According to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, this filtering process is a primary reason decisions are made without the full picture. “It depends on how many filters get applied before a decision-maker gets it,” Douglas said.
The pattern is common in property operations: a property manager requests information from a building engineer or associate and receives only what was asked for. That manager then reports to an asset manager or owner, and the same selective passing occurs. “Not that it’s being massaged,” Douglas said, “but it’s being filtered.” He emphasizes that this isn’t about dishonesty; employees naturally focus on metrics they are measured and paid on. “They’re not lying,” he said. “They’re performing to what they’re being measured for.”
As a result, corporate teams, especially asset managers, often build their own spreadsheets to recapture filtered data. The data exists but isn’t reaching them in full. Douglas, who has coached entrepreneurs for 30 years, distinguishes between backward-looking and forward-looking key performance indicators (KPIs). Monthly financials show past performance but don’t 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 holds the numbers, information lives behind that person’s login rather than with the company. Emailed spreadsheets can be outdated by the time they’re read. The cost becomes evident during a sale or financing when a buyer’s or lender’s diligence team requests operating history behind a figure, and the honest answer is that it’s on someone’s laptop. “Anything can happen. Bad optics,” Douglas said. “Most commonly, people stop pursuing it.” Alternatively, owners may start collecting data properly from that point, meaning 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 deal timeline and price.
Many companies respond by building dashboards around key metrics, but Douglas says this has limits. A person can 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 operating data reveals what to fix.
With the full data set in one place, software can monitor for anomalies people can’t. Owners can set systems to flag anything outside normal ranges over months or years, and different stakeholders—building engineer, property manager, asset manager, CFO, and limited partners—can see the view they need from the same data. Douglas clarifies this isn’t about replacing staff. “Your property still needs that many property managers,” he said. The value comes from efficiency and decisions based on complete information rather than filtered reports. More on this approach is available on the OpticWise blog. OpticWise is a commercial real estate digital infrastructure and data strategy firm. 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.
