Commercial property owners and asset managers frequently make decisions without complete information because data passes through multiple filters before reaching them. Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, explains that each person in the reporting chain passes along only what they are accountable for, gradually stripping away detail. "It depends on how many filters get applied before a decision-maker gets it," he said.
The pattern is common 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. "Not that it’s being massaged," Douglas said, "but it’s being filtered." He is careful not to blame individuals, noting that people naturally focus on the metrics they are measured and paid on. If a number looks bad, it may not make the report. "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 it 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 reveal 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 their own risks. When one person keeps the numbers, the information lives behind that person’s login rather than with the company. Emailed spreadsheets can quickly become outdated. The cost becomes evident during a sale or financing when 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 may start 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, potentially affecting both the timeline and the price of a deal.
Many companies try to address these problems by building dashboards around a handful of key metrics. Douglas acknowledges 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 operating data shows what to fix.
With the full data set in one place, software can monitor for anomalies people might miss. Owners can set systems to flag anything outside its normal range over the past six months or several years, and different stakeholders—from building engineers to CFOs and limited partners—can see the view they need from the same data. Douglas emphasizes 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.
