Filtered Data in Commercial Real Estate Leaves Owners Without Full Picture, OpticWise CEO Says

When information about a commercial building reaches its owner, it has typically passed through multiple hands, with each transfer stripping away detail, according to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise. Douglas says this filtering is a primary reason owners and asset managers often make decisions without the full picture. “It depends on how many filters get applied before a decision-maker gets it,” he said.

The pattern is familiar in property operations: a property manager requests information from a building engineer, who provides only what was asked; the 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. “They’re not lying,” he said. “They’re performing to what they’re being measured for.” People naturally focus on metrics tied to their compensation or accountability, so unfavorable numbers may not surface.

As a result, corporate teams, especially asset managers, often create their own spreadsheets to recapture missing information. 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 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 maintains the numbers, the information resides behind that individual’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 Emailed spreadsheets can quickly become outdated.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 requests 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 begin collecting data properly from that point forward, 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 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.”

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 operating data reveals what to fix. With the full data set in one place, software can monitor for anomalies—flagging anything outside its normal range over six months or several years—and different stakeholders, from building engineers to limited partners, can view the same data through their own lens.

Douglas stresses that 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. 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.