Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise and co-author of Peak Property Performance®, argues that most asset managers don’t realize they have a data credibility problem until they’re already paying for it. His diagnostic is blunt: ask your property manager where a number came from. If the answer involves a spreadsheet, an email chain, or a named employee who manually updates a file on a specific day of the week, the data & digital infrastructure has already failed.
“I’d simply ask, can you show me where this number originated?” Douglas says. “If the answer is a spreadsheet, an email chain, or someone else saying, Mary updates that on Friday, ‘then you have your answer.”
The issue, according to Douglas, isn’t just accuracy. It’s lineage, whether a given indicator can be traced back to the system that originally generated it. If not, every decision made from that number is built on data that has been interpreted, delayed, or filtered by human hands before it reached the person accountable for outcomes.
Aggregated Data Looks Backward. Source Data Looks Forward.
Douglas draws a sharp distinction between the summary-level data that most property management systems provide and the source data that actually explains performance. Financials and occupancy rates are top-line indicators; they tell you what happened. They don’t tell you why it happened, which is the only information useful for making forward-looking decisions.
“Source data helps you understand why, so you can start to look forward,” Douglas says.
He points to a recent example that illustrates the cost of this gap. An asset manager he spoke with last week discovered a line-item variance of roughly 75 percent – a monthly expense that came in nearly double what was budgeted. Tracing the cause took an entire day of investigation.
“Right now, with rents capped and expenses peaking, they have to drill into everything, and it’s taking an inordinate amount of time to figure out why we’re out of variance,” Douglas says.
That one-day investigation is not an isolated inefficiency. It’s a symptom of a data architecture that forces asset managers to reconstruct information that should already be accessible. Multiply that across a portfolio and across a year, and the labor cost of manual data tracing becomes a meaningful drag on operations.
Buyers Price What They Can’t Verify
The consequences of data opacity extend beyond internal operations. Douglas argues that sophisticated buyers treat unverifiable operating data as a direct financial risk – and they price that risk into their offers.
“Sophisticated buyers price uncertainty, and all dealmakers know this,” Douglas says. “If a buyer can’t verify operating performance, then they assume risk, and risk turns into discounts.”
That discount can take several forms: a lower purchase price, larger reserves, extended diligence timelines, or deals that simply stall. In a market where owners are already managing compressed margins, the inability to produce traceable operating data at the point of sale is a direct hit to exit value.
The same dynamic applies to refinancing. Lenders want confidence that the asset performs the way it’s presented in the financials. When an asset manager can trace operating data back to financial results, Douglas argues, they’re not just presenting better numbers – they’re strengthening the credibility behind those numbers.
“Better operating data doesn’t replace financials,” Douglas says. “It strengthens credibility behind those financials.”
What OpticWise Proposes as a Starting Point
Douglas’s position is that the fix doesn’t begin with software. It begins with a question: where does this number come from, and can I get there in a few clicks?
OpticWise approaches this through what Douglas describes as a data and digital domain assessment – a structured inventory of what operating data a property or portfolio is already generating, who controls it, and whether it can be reused across assets. According to Douglas, the company provides this framework at no cost, including a breakdown of six domains and 67 elements, available through their published book: Peak Property Performance®.
Douglas recommends asset managers spend the first 90 days on what the book calls the Clarify stage of the PPP 5C™ framework: asking where the data originates, who owns it, and whether it can be reused across the portfolio.
“You probably won’t have a transformed portfolio in 90 days, but you’ll know where your biggest blind spots are,” Douglas says.
For asset managers operating in a market where every variance matters and every dollar of NOI is compounded at exit, knowing where the data gaps are is where they can start building value – in Douglas’s words, “clarify what you own and control, and then come up with a strategy to fix that.”
About OpticWise
OpticWise is the data and digital infrastructure partner for commercial real estate, founded in 2004. The company helps owners and operators turn fragmented, vendor-controlled building technology into governed, owner-controlled data and digital infrastructure that compounds value across a portfolio. Learn more at opticwise.com. Bill Douglas is co-author of Peak Property Performance®: Game-Changing AI and Digital Strategies for Commercial Real Estate (Fast Company Press). Learn more at peakpropertyperformance.com.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
