Commercial property owners and asset managers often make decisions without the full picture because information is filtered as it moves up the chain, according to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise. Douglas said the issue is not dishonesty but natural filtering: each person passes along only what they are accountable for. “Not that it’s being massaged, but it’s being filtered,” he said. “They’re not lying. They’re performing to what they’re being measured for.”
The consequence is that corporate teams, especially asset managers, build their own spreadsheets to recapture missing details. That creates new risks: information lives behind one person’s login, and emailed copies can be outdated. Douglas, who has coached entrepreneurs for 30 years, distinguishes backward-looking financials from forward-looking key performance indicators. Monthly financials show how a property performed, but they don’t show how to change what comes next. “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.”
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 begins collecting data properly from that point forward, so usable history starts on day one instead of reaching back years. Either way, gaps in operating data make a property harder to evaluate and can affect both the timeline and the price of a deal.
Many companies respond by building dashboards around a handful of key metrics. Douglas said 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.” He argues real control comes from source data: “Aggregated data tells you what happened. Source data helps you understand why.” 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 flag anything outside its normal range over the past six months or several 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 is clear 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 (Fast Company Press) and host of the Peak Property Performance podcast. For Long Beach and surrounding commercial real estate owners, the implication is direct: without access to source data, they risk slower deals, lower valuations, and missed opportunities to improve net operating income. As Douglas puts it, visibility of a few KPIs is not the same as control—and in a market where capital is watching operating performance closely, that distinction can determine whether a property trades or stalls.
