In commercial real estate, some of the biggest hits to NOI never show up as a single dramatic failure. They show up as hidden networks, redundant systems, stranded CapEx, and technology nobody owns strategically. Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise and co-author of Peak Property Performance, has seen the same preventable patterns again and again: owners paying for networks four or more times, paying for systems they don’t control, or paying for systems that were never operationalized.
One of the most common findings during an OpticWise audit is the rogue network—a network installed by a tenant, a vendor, or a previous property manager that never made it onto any documentation. In one case, an undocumented duplicate network operated in the background for years before it failed and finally surfaced. Six years. Nobody knew it was there until something broke. In multi-tenant commercial real estate, tenants sometimes install their own point-of-sale systems or connectivity workarounds. Vendors run cables and configure systems without coordinating with anyone else in the building. The result is a property carrying multiple networks that do the same job, none of which are being properly monitored, and all of which are costing money.
Another costly pattern: hardware systems that are installed but never turned on. During an audit, OpticWise discovered a system that had been installed when the building was constructed. It was a capital investment. The software subscription had been running the entire time. And it had never once been turned on. When the system was finally activated and programmed, the building saved $56,000 in utilities over the following twelve months—from a system that was already paid for, already installed, and sitting completely dormant. Ownership transitions, property manager turnover, and handoffs that lack proper documentation are common causes.
Across the properties OpticWise has audited, one of the most consistent findings is capital expenditure on systems with zero return. Technology is purchased, installed, and then handed off to a property team that was never trained on it, never asked about it, and does not have the bandwidth or skill set to operate it. Owners often treat technology as a line item instead of an operating lever, meaning there is no clear return target, no performance measurement, and no accountability when a system goes dark.
The common thread is simple: if you don’t own your data and digital infrastructure, your vendors do. And over time, a building’s “intelligence” becomes someone else’s asset. Every one of these failures comes back to the same root cause: no one mapped the digital infrastructure, no one owned it strategically, and no one was tracking whether it was working. Douglas puts it plainly: “You can’t fix what you can’t see.”
A data and digital infrastructure review does not just surface savings. It surfaces the unknown—the systems no one knew were running, the expenses no one thought to question, and the investments sitting idle that could be generating returns today. OpticWise’s Peak Property Performance DDI Review is designed to find exactly these gaps, before they cost another six years of waste. Visit opticwise.com to learn more, or explore the Peak Property Performance book and podcast at peakpropertyperformance.com.
