In an industry known for calculating the exact return on new countertops or carpet, most commercial real estate owners have no idea what their digital infrastructure is worth – or that they don’t actually own it.
Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, has spent over three decades witnessing a peculiar phenomenon: commercial real estate is the only industry that routinely allows vendors to install networks in their buildings, mine data from their own assets, and leave owners with systems they can never use again.
“You wouldn’t see Amazon do it. Toyota wouldn’t do it. Pick any Fortune 1000 company – none of them would allow vendors to put networks in their buildings that they can’t control,” Douglas explains. “But commercial real estate does it all the time.”
The Hidden Revenue Stream
For apartment buildings, the financial impact is staggering: ownership of digital infrastructure typically generates $500 per door per year in Net Operating Income (NOI) – not revenue, but actual bottom line net income. For office properties, that translates to 50 to 75 cents per rentable square foot.
Yet less than 5% of commercial real estate properties have access to a comprehensive dataset about their own operations. They may have forward-facing market data through property management systems, but when they look internally, the data simply isn’t there – or worse, it sits in vendor silos they can’t access.
“Property owners can tell you exactly what a new countertop will let them charge in rent, but they have no idea what the return is on digital infrastructure because it’s never been managed and monitored,” Douglas notes. “Even when I’ve shown owners that they could add $500 per door per year, some have said ‘we’re good, thanks.’ For a 400-unit building, that’s $200,000 annually they’re walking away from.”
The AI Readiness Gap
The implications extend far beyond immediate revenue. As the commercial real estate industry races to adopt AI, including machine learning, most properties lack the foundational requirement: their own data.
Through his work at OpticWise, Douglas has identified 55 ways to win with AI in commercial real estate, but the reality is stark. “AI can’t fix what it can’t see,” he emphasizes. “These properties need six to nine months of data collection before they can even attempt predictive analytics or machine learning.”
The problem isn’t just about having data, it’s about having the right data working together. A typical 250,000-square-foot property runs on a dozen separate networks and 15 to 18 different systems, all operating in isolation. The HVAC system can’t see that 150 people are about to walk into an auditorium. The lighting system doesn’t know the cleaning crew left at midnight. The parking system isn’t connected to occupancy data.
“What if all of that was brought together?” Douglas asks. “What if owners could look across all these silos and find ways to operate even better? That’s market differentiation. That’s more profit while potentially charging lower rent.”
Who’s Leading the Change
The resistance isn’t universal. Douglas has observed a clear pattern in who adopts technology and who doesn’t.
Family offices, in particular, have emerged as thought leaders. Moving faster than REITs and less risk-averse than traditional operators, family offices with significant commercial real estate holdings are proving that mid-market companies – those with 10 to 150 properties – can move with agility.
OpticWise focuses exclusively on this mid-market segment: operators with 10 or more properties, because, as Douglas explains, “The sales process is the same length for somebody with 2 or 200 properties.”
Privacy as Competitive Advantage
One area where Douglas and OpticWise have drawn a firm line is tenant privacy. While competitors monetize user data and major ISPs track online behavior to serve ads and geofence customers, OpticWise has chosen what Douglas calls “the high road.”
“We don’t collect any personally identifiable information. Period,” he states. “From an ethical standpoint, we believe the tenant’s data should always be private.”
The decision came from a personal place. Years ago, Douglas watched his son, then a college student, search for apartments with privacy as a top priority. “He was willing to pay $2,200 a month in rent, and some owners were just mining him for data. That’s when we decided: we’re taking the high road, even if it means fewer customers.”
When property owners ask how they can monetize tenant data, Douglas’s answer is simple: “No. If that’s where you want to go, we’ll step down. There’s a lot more money in reducing utilities, insurance, and increasing occupancy than there is in sending ads to tenants.”
OpticWise’s ultimate privacy policy has become a differentiator. “Everything we do relative to data is talking about data generated by the systems in a commercial real estate property – air conditioning, elevators, access control, parking meters, video security,” Douglas explains. “We don’t collect any PII. The data belongs to the property, and we help them access and use it. But tenant data? We never touch it, we don’t pierce that veil, and we’re proud of it.”
Building True Resilience
Beyond data ownership and privacy, Douglas champions what he calls true resilience: digital infrastructure that works when the power goes out, whether buildings are empty or they’re full.
“If we were on a call and you were in an OpticWise-led building on a laptop and the power went out, you wouldn’t lose the call,” he explains. “When power goes out and their building keeps working, owners turn it into a sales piece: come have your employees work here.”
This level of resilience requires design thinking that starts with the end in mind. Rather than accepting single points of failure, OpticWise designs networks backward, starting with all the sensors, devices, and systems that need to connect, then engineering the minimum number of closets for both capital and operational efficiency.
Drew Hall, founder of OpticWise and a world-class digital architect, leads this design process alongside his team. Douglas, coming from a power background, ensures the resilience extends to every layer.
“Every device has a meantime to failure,” Douglas notes. “Instead of putting redundant switches in every closet at $10,000 to $12,000 each, you can keep a spare on-site. If you lose a switch, it takes an hour or two to replace. That’s a significant cost reduction while maintaining resilience.”
OpticWise monitors all networks 24/7/365, identifying when things start to “act wonky” and switching traffic around potential failures in real time – often before clients even know there was an issue.
The Path Forward: Know What You Don’t Know
For Douglas, the first step isn’t hiring consultants or investing in expensive systems. It’s much simpler – yet different than the status quo.
“Do you know what you don’t know, or is it the unknown unknown?” he asks. “The unknown unknown means you’re flying blind. At least if you know what you don’t know, you can build a plan to address it, or choose to ignore it with a known risk instead of an unknown risk.”
Through OpticWise’s PPP audit process, clients can clarify what digital assets they own and don’t own – typically the first revelation for most properties. “When we audit properties, most of them have no data lake, no data set of their own. If there’s a dozen systems, maybe they have access to one or two databases. But if it’s in their vendor’s cloud, or in an on-prem device, not in a place where they could run a data set on it, AI is useless.”
The approach combines strategic thinking with technical execution. “This starts with strategy from the top, change management, understanding what you own and don’t own,” Douglas explains. “The actual ‘how’ in the weeds, that’s where teams need help. Most can’t do it themselves. I’ve met with the biggest REITs and the smallest companies, and I can probably count in less than 10 companies that are able to run their own machine learning.”
The Bottom Line
For mid-market commercial real estate operators – those with 10 or more properties – the message is clear: digital infrastructure isn’t an expense to be minimized. It’s an investment that should drive regular, measurable returns.
At $500 per door annually for apartments, or 50 to 75 cents per square foot for office space, the opportunity cost of not owning digital infrastructure is simply too high to ignore. Add in the operational efficiencies, the tenant satisfaction improvements, the insurance reductions, and the AI-ready data capabilities, and the case becomes overwhelming.
“Technology should be how owners become better operators, improve tenant satisfaction, and reduce expenses,” Douglas concludes. “But first, they need to own what digital is already in their buildings and the data being generated right now. The question is: who’s benefiting from it?”
For an industry built on maximizing the value of physical assets, it’s time to apply the same rigor to digital ones.
Bill Douglas is CEO of OpticWise. For over three decades, Bill has been at the forefront of using technology to solve complex business problems. His relationships and entrepreneurial experiences guide OpticWise through rapid growth while promoting technology changes that impact the commercial real estate markets.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
