OpticWise CEO: Filtered Data Leads to Poor CRE Decisions

When information about a commercial building reaches its owner, it has often passed through multiple hands, with each handoff stripping away critical detail. Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, identifies this filtering as a primary reason owners and asset managers make decisions without the full picture. The pattern is familiar: a property manager asks a building engineer for data, receives only what was requested, and then passes a similarly narrow report up the chain. As Bill notes, “Not that it’s being massaged, but it’s being filtered.” He emphasizes that people aren’t lying; they’re performing to what they’re measured on, so bad metrics may never make the report.

Consequently, corporate teams, especially asset managers, often build their own spreadsheets to recapture lost information. Bill, who has coached entrepreneurs for 30 years, distinguishes between backward-looking financials and forward-looking KPIs. “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 asks. Homegrown spreadsheets create new problems: data lives behind individual logins, and emailed versions quickly become outdated. During a sale or financing, when a buyer’s or lender’s diligence team requests operating history, the honest answer may be that it sits on someone’s laptop. This leads to bad optics or abandoned deals, or forces owners to start collecting data properly from that point forward, limiting usable history. Gaps in operating data make properties harder to evaluate, affecting both timeline and price.

While dashboards offer visibility into a handful of KPIs, Bill warns that visibility is not control. “Someone builds a dashboard around it, and they think they have control of everything,” he says. “All they have is visibility of the KPIs. That is not control.” True control, he argues, comes from access to source data. “Aggregated data tells you what happened. Source data helps you understand why.” With the full data set in one place, software can flag anomalies, and different stakeholders—from building engineers to limited partners—can see the view they need. Bill stresses this isn’t about replacing staff; property managers are still essential. The value lies in efficiency and decisions based on complete information. More on this approach is available on the OpticWise blog. OpticWise is a commercial real estate digital infrastructure and data strategy firm. CEO Bill 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.