When information about a commercial building reaches its owner, it has typically passed through several hands, and each handoff strips 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 pattern is familiar: a property manager requests data from a building engineer, who provides only what was asked. The property manager then reports to an asset manager or owner, and the same selective process repeats. “Not that it’s being massaged,” Douglas said, “but it’s being filtered.” He does not blame individuals, noting that people naturally focus on the 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 information. The data exists but does not reach 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 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introduce new risks: data lives behind individual logins rather than with the company, and emailed copies may be outdated.
The cost becomes acute during a sale or financing. When a buyer’s or lender’s diligence team requests the operating history behind a figure, the honest answer may be that it sits on someone’s laptop. “Anything can happen. Bad optics,” Douglas said. “Most commonly, people stop pursuing it.” Alternatively, the owner may begin collecting data properly from that point, meaning 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.” He 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 operating data reveals what to fix. With the full data set in one place, software can monitor for anomalies, flagging anything outside normal ranges over months or years. Different stakeholders—building engineer, property manager, asset manager, CFO, and limited partners—can then see the view they need from the same data.
Douglas emphasizes that this approach does not replace staff. “Your property still needs that many property managers,” he said. The value lies in efficiency and 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.
