Top Ten Lessons Shaping Peak Property Performance

Drew Hall: All right, everybody, welcome back to Peak Property Performance Podcast. I'm your co-host Drew Hall. With me as always, I have co-host Bill Douglas, and today is a special one. It's a milestone. We've officially reached episode number 50.

Bill Douglas: Woo-hoo!

Bill Douglas: 50.

Bill Douglas: Yeah.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Now, over the first 49 episodes, we have had conversations with owners and operators, asset managers, property managers, technology leaders, people approaching commercial real estate from so many different perspectives. But for episode 50, we went back through those conversations and picked 10 moments that we thought were especially worth visiting. But real quickly, before we get started, do all the things that we normally say, please like, follow, subscribe, and ring that bell so you get notifications as we drop new episodes. But yeah, let's get going.

Bill Douglas: Okay. These 10 aren't necessarily the 10 biggest names or the 10 most dramatic clips. What became interesting was what happened when we put the ideas next to each other, right? People working in completely different parts of the industry didn't know each other and they kept coming back to some of the same challenges and the, the the same wishes or the same failures, you know, the same challenges. How do you operate the asset better? What information do you actually have when you need to make a decision? How much of the technology environment do you really understand? That one gets talked about a lot. And how much control do you have over the systems and the data that your properties depend on?

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, and you'll see as we go forward that these 10 clips together tell a larger story, which is there's real estate performance increasingly depends on operations, and better operations require better information. And of course, AI raises the stakes for getting that foundation right.

Bill Douglas: Right.

Bill Douglas: And the foundation being data and digital infrastructure. We've seen so many times that most CRE owners still have significant gaps in how they access and use their data. And I'm constantly mesmerized by how many of them think they actually own the data, even Like when they don't, they think they have access to it, or even when they do own it, they don't have access to it. So the path forward is greater owner control over the systems, information, and digital infrastructure that determines how the assets perform.

Drew Hall: Yeah. So the format for today's show, we're going to play each of these clips, and again, it's 10 clips, and then we'll talk about why we think that these particular ones matter, because we had so many to choose from. And then by the time we get to number 10, you're going to hear a pretty clear story about where commercial real estate is heading. Very sure of it. Very sure. So number 1, let's get started with Greg Lozanac from episode 33.

Bill Douglas: Greg is a CRE advisor spanning capital development and multifamily execution, and he had a wealth of ideas, but we put this one on the top 10 list.

Greg Lozenak: Real estate used to be a financial asset, right? You would underwrite a deal, you'd buy it at a great price, get good leverage, and underwrite some cap rate compression, or maybe not underwrite the cap rate compression, but expect it. And so you could buy a property, run it okay or average, and still get a great exit because of the cap rate environment.

Greg Lozenak: Today, that cap rate environment's kind of gone away, that cap rate compression.

Greg Lozenak: And so real estate has moved from a financial asset to an operational asset in that you really have to maximize the performance of a property from an operations standpoint to really get your targeted exit.

Bill Douglas: There were times when the market could make up for a few operational mistakes, like with cap rate compression and favorable interest rates, things like that. That's a much tougher game now. If you've underwritten a certain outcome, increasingly you have to operate your way to that outcome through efficiencies and process improvements.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that changes what deserves attention at the ownership level. What happens inside the property every day has a much more direct connection to the investment result.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, and once operations become that important, the next question is whether the people responsible for those operations actually have what they need to perform. And that's a nice bridge to our next clip that brings us up to Jennifer O'Connell. She's Uniland property manager and an accidental technologist. She was fun to have on the show.

Drew Hall: We stop being operational gap troubleshooters and we start being more of performance drivers. for the asset. And in doing that, you have to look at the building at not being mortar and bricks, but being a literal breathing entity. And when you do that, you're basically able to see the playing field. The property managers before were making game decisions in real time without having that information. So you can see property teams are being asked to make increasingly consequential decisions without a complete picture what's happening across the asset in larger picture. And those property managers make constant decisions that affect expense, tenant experience, asset performance. And all too often the information that's needed to make those decisions sits across different systems and vendors and departments, and people then have to compensate manually, which creates more troubleshooting and less time for actual performance improvement.

Bill Douglas: Well, the answer cannot be to turn every property manager into a technologist. They need to understand the technology, but they can't be a technologist. They have so many other things to do. And we shouldn't solve that by giving the property manager another 5 dashboards. Dashboards are not actionable intelligence, right? The system around the operator should still make good decisions easier.

Drew Hall: Yeah, that's right. So one of the themes we've heard repeatedly is that the people closest to the property are making decisions all day long, but the information around them is often very fragmented. They're having to reconstruct the picture before they can even act. So when the economics of the asset leave very little room for error, that information problem becomes much more painful. So let's hear about that from... this is Ron Kutas talking about that in episode number 22. Ron is the CEO of OneWall and a workforce housing owner-operator.

Ron Kutas: It is a low margin kind of business and the margin for error is very, very slim. It kind of, for, it just puts a spotlight on anything that's not going well. And for us, At least as an operator and third-party manager, the ability to make decisions that impact operations is really, really important. And to make those decisions, we need the data. If you don't have the data, it's impossible to make decisions. And we've seen it time and time again where you're making decisions based on anecdotal evidence that you're given from a community manager or a leasing consultant, and it ends up really hurting you. So my takeaway from Ron's comment is that poor information eventually becomes a financial problem. Workforce housing makes the stakes especially visible because margins are already thin, but this lesson applies across asset classes.

Bill Douglas: Delayed decisions, unnecessary expenses, and repeatable mistakes all accumulate. Better data is not primarily a technology objective. It's a business objective, and it's an operating and financial discipline because the tighter the margin, the faster you feel the consequences. But every asset has places where a decision made with weak information can cost Significantly.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Experience itself and intuition itself, those still matter. Uh, when anecdotal observations become substitutes for evidence, that is a problem. So owners need enough information to tell the difference between a genuine pattern versus a one-time event. That distinction affects capital allocation, staffing, maintenance, leasing, and lots of other downstream decisions. So the goal is to give good operators something stronger than just a collection of anecdotal stories to base their otherwise good judgment on.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, I agree. The goal is not more data. Everybody says data is so valuable, but more is not necessarily good. It has to be the right data, right? The goal is enough reliable information to make a better operating decision. I think that's an underlying message we hear across every guest on the show. But what has changed is how much more we now expect to do with that data. Which brings us up to clip number 4, David Stifter, PredictAP founder and former DigitalBridge Colony Capital technology leader, talking specifically about AI and data.

David Stifter: For 20 years ago, we're talking about clean data, data dictionaries, data controls, data,

Bill Douglas: Colony Capital, right? Private equity?

David Stifter: Yeah, Colony Capital, private equity, but also other CTOs, other accountants. You know, I think it's something when folks in industry get together, there's always this kind of acknowledgement that, hey, we can, we can always do better and have better data, more consistent data, and we're acknowledging that there's some level of loss of granularity and loss of consistency that exists in every company. How much that is varies company to company, but I think the point now is that the consequences of that maybe vary as well, where before it led to a lot more manual work, a lot more issues. Maybe you weren't seeing trends as well as you otherwise might, opportunities and risks and things like that. Now what people are seeing, and AI is definitely the shiny object of the moment, right? I think this one is, it's different than prior kind of buzzword shiny object things like blockchain and other things where it's like, okay, that's a neat science experiment, but is there going to be an impact? I think we all know we're all using AI to different degrees, personal enablement and other things, but to do these things now, the data is that much more important. So kind of the entry-level stakes for getting into the AI game for a lot of these use cases is good consistent data. And with that, you can do a lot more. Without that, you're either not able to do it or you're doing it in a way that you actually could be creating, you know, bad outcomes.

Drew Hall: So AI has made longstanding data problems more consequential, not less relevant. AI also increases speed, and that can be an advantage when the information is trustworthy, but it can also accelerate bad assumptions when the underlying information is poor. So the AI conversation has to include the data environment that feeds it. And before you ask what AI can tell you, you have to know what information it is seeing. where that information came from and whether you can trust it.

Bill Douglas: I fully agree. And AI changes what owners and asset managers especially can potentially do with property and portfolio information. We talked about how it has to be comparable. Property 1 has to be comparable to property 9, has to be comparable to property 99, and it only does that with the right data. But AI does not remove the need for strong underlying information environment, right? Owners still need the consistency, but access and governance and context across the digital infrastructure and all the data being produced by it. If those fundamentals are weak, advanced tools, you know, AI is the hot topic of the last 2 years. Advanced tools will be limited by the same weakness. Drew and I talk about this a lot, both on the show and off, but AI gives owners a much more powerful set of possibilities, but it doesn't let you skip fundamentals underneath them.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, so the discussion shifts from just generic data quality to actual owner control. So just real quickly go through some of these questions that we've asked. Sprinkled throughout all these episodes, of course. A lot of times they're repeated. Questions like, you as the owner, can you access the information? Is that information, that data, is it structured? Can it be combined across systems? Can you, as the owner, can you determine how outside tools use that data? Or is it locked up inside one particular system? Can it remain useful when a vendor changes? Because it's going to happen. Can you still utilize that data outside of that one vendor's system? And owners assume that they have that level of control until they start asking just a few deeper questions. So that sets up clip number 5 here, which was from our conversation with Gino Barbaro, multilevel investor with over 2,000 units, $450 million assets under management.

Drew Hall: Let's hear from Gino.

Gino Barbaro: We're probably 90% of all commercial real estate operators are lacking in that because unfortunately, well, or fortunately, we have the older type of assets where there isn't a lot.

Bill Douglas: It's a great asset. Do you have a copy of that data or is it all inside of the PMS system?

Gino Barbaro: It's all inside of, probably inside of the PMS system.

Bill Douglas: So... My key takeaway from Gino's comment is that using a system every day doesn't necessarily mean the owner has meaningful control of the information inside of that system. Gino is an experienced and very successful operator, and he was quite fun to have on the show because he was so candid and energetic. And that's what makes this moment useful. It shows how common it is for owners to rely heavily on vendor platforms. without fully considering what happens to the underlying information. By what happens to, like, who owns it? Where does it go? Can I ever use it again? Kind of thing. What I liked about this conversation was that there was no defensiveness around it. It was an experienced operator recognizing that there was another layer to the question of data ownership and digital infrastructure ownership.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, and you know, there's an important difference between being able to see the data versus being able to independently use it and control it. An owner may have access to a dashboard or multiple dashboards, but limited ability to combine that information elsewhere. So again, like we were saying before, locked up in one particular vendor's system, let's say. So the real question is what happens when the owner wants to change vendors, build new analytics, or connect the information to another system, bring it up to a higher level and utilize the information independently across the campus, across the portfolio even. So you can have very good software and still discover that your ability to use the underlying information is narrower than what you had assumed.

Bill Douglas: I was on stage at a conference a couple of weeks ago and the MC on a panel said, give me something that the operators in the room can take home and use tomorrow. And I, from the cuff, said, go to your vendors, all of them, regardless of whether they're service or software or whatever, and ask if I replaced you tomorrow, what do I own? What do I retain? And the whole intention is how much of this is yours? How much of this is mine? And this is just the solution you're paying them for. But there are several different things people often mean when they say they own their data, right? They legally own it. Maybe, maybe not. They might have owned it and given up a license in perpetuity. They can see it. Most of the time they can't. It's hidden behind a dashboard.

Bill Douglas: They can export it. They can independently access it. They can preserve it when vendors change. Key point to ask. They can decide what other tools are allowed to do with that data. But these are not all the same thing, right? The reason that distinction matters becomes clearer when you look at what asset managers increasingly want. from the data and from the underlying information in it. Hey, that's a nice bridge that brings us up to clip 6 from Abid Butt, a global hospitality executive and asset manager of a $9 billion portfolio.

Abid Butt: Asset managers want more information, more real-time information, and more so now than ever, more predictive analytics. And that's the only way we can go from driving a bus, looking at the rearview mirror and looking forward. That has become critical. Now, we must understand the infrastructure that real estate industry is using, and we fraught with fragmented systems and systems that don't talk to each other. And the information that comes in that is manually manipulated and sometimes becomes inaccurate or, or not timely to make the decisions that are required. But having predictive analytics, and there is a whole bunch of things that go into that, that would help tremendously. There is a lot of historic indices available. Historic indices, as I have said to my colleagues over the years, that they're great.

Abid Butt: We can learn from it. I can kick and I can scream and I can celebrate. I cannot change that. The only thing that I can change is what's coming down in front of me and be focused on possibly impacting the future in my favor. You can learn from history. Predictive analytics would be more useful. And that has not been the case up until now, partly because the environment that we operate in.

Drew Hall: All right. So we definitely have this takeaway from Avid. Information becomes more valuable when it arrives early enough to influence an outcome. So think about it for a moment. Traditional reporting, it's still necessary, but one of the few troubles with traditional reporting is that it's often limited to showing you the aftereffects where some economic reality has already occurred. It's too late to make a difference there. You just measured something from the past. But the larger opportunity is to identify meaningful changes sooner, and this gives asset managers more time to intervene.

Drew Hall: And obviously there's a big difference between understanding why something just happened versus comparing it and seeing the right indicators early enough to do something before it happens again.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, we talk about that a lot on the show, Drew, with forward-looking KPIs versus backwards-looking KPIs. Financials are backwards-looking. It's what happened yesterday, 10 days ago, last quarter, last month, whatever. And predictive KPIs are ones that gives you the ability to know, oh, I'm going to miss numbers this month. Or if I'm going to miss them, how early can I start to work on it? Whether that's leasing or expenses or insurance, utilities, whatever. Predictive capability doesn't begin with a predictive dashboard. Problem is there's dashboards spread out all over the place. How many different dashboards do you have now? Right? It begins with capturing the right information consistently enough to establish patterns.

Bill Douglas: And then it really is only useful if it becomes an actionable event that somebody can do to make a change. Digital infrastructure underneath the analytics determines what is possible, right? So everybody wants the predictive layer. Everybody's talking about AI and autonomy, but that layer depends on what you're collecting underneath it and whether you can actually connect those signals and make it something that somebody can do. So if it never ends up in a decision, it's useless.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, and I think it's, it's probably good here to issue sort of a warning, like not to overpressure yourself with this notion of real-time data. Like real-time data is great, but You know, there's a law of diminishing return here, I would say, because you don't need every data point instantly. Really focus on the things that you just need to know early enough to change a meaningful decision. Think about the goal itself. You're wanting to change something in the system so that, like we talked about, those traditional reports are just telling you something from the past. You want to make a difference about something now that's going to lead to a result, a favorable result, and hopefully a fiscally favorable result in the future. So here's a rhetorical question for thought.

Drew Hall: What would you want to know earlier? Because knowing it earlier would actually change what you do. So that's a good way to think about it in terms of prioritizing, like what to focus on for real time or not.

Bill Douglas: That's a great question.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, better information only helps if ownership is willing to let it challenge the assumptions that are already made about the asset. And that can sometimes be a painful process because it's just challenging assumptions in and of itself sometimes is not really as welcome as you might think it is, even for yourself, right? Guilty. Okay. So that sets up clip number 7 here from Rick Lackey. He's the founder of RPN. He has 30+ years in commercial real estate brokerage. The market always sounds better at the conferences than it does at the property level.

Rick Lackey: It's, you know, it really kind of comes down to that, but I'd say the biggest disconnect is probably the owners. You know, they all think that their asset is an exception to the market as opposed to, you know, just another commodity building in the market.

Bill Douglas: You know, everyone thinks their building's worth more, will lease faster, deserves higher rents than, you know, what the market is actually telling them. The reaction that I had from Rick was that good asset management requires an accurate view of the property, even when that view conflicts with the story ownership wants to believe. So I think it came down to, are the reports what somebody wants them to say or what the data actually says? Like, are they massaged? Are we trying to hit a goal? Are we ignoring... I have an entrepreneur group and we call it the blind spot. Are we ignoring our blind spots? Right. There's some humor here because every owner naturally believes there's something special about their asset. Otherwise they wouldn't have bought it or built it. Right. But optimism cannot become a substitute for evidence.

Bill Douglas: I love that. Optimism cannot become a substitute for evidence. The operating environment has a way of exposing weak assumptions eventually. And the problem we're seeing come up over and over and over again is the operating environment is generating data, but the data is not being analyzed. Every CRE owner is naturally going to see the strengths in their own asset. The discipline is being willing to see what the property and the market are telling you when the evidence goes the other direction.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Property-level data creates another source of truth, and it can show owners whether assumptions about leasing, utilization, expenses, tenant behavior, or service levels are actually playing out. And that can make decision-making more responsive and less emotional. You can still use best-in-class vendors. The difference is that the vendor becomes one component of your operating environment rather than the place where everything begins and ends. And ideally, you've got the best vendor-provided systems in place for your environment. But even then, those vendors' systems are just the means to the end. And that end is an owner-controlled environment.

Bill Douglas: I want to emphasize what you just said, Drew. The end, the goal is the owner-controlled environment.

Drew Hall: Absolutely.

Bill Douglas: And, you know, how many times have we done, you know, a review, we used to call it an audit, but a review and they, the owner or the manager, the asset manager, the property manager don't actually know what they own and don't own relative to data and digital. So the goal again, reduce the distance between what ownership believes is happening and what is actually happening at the property. Like, can you point at data and see the source rather than the results? And can you tie that to your goals for the property? Once an owner decides they want a better view of that asset and more control over how that information gets used, the next question becomes what they can actually do about it.

Drew Hall: All right.

Bill Douglas: Our next clip is clip number 8 from David Burniman. He's the Golden Bee CEO, a vertically integrated owner-operator, and he gave us one specific example.

David Burnman: We started to tinker with the API access and think about how we can effectively create our own version of AppFolio. I mean, that's really what it comes down to.

Bill Douglas: It would allow for that.

David Burnman: And so we, we still are at our infancy stage, admittedly. You know, we only started early this year. So we're about 6 months into a lifecycle of building out these various workflows, but it's working out pretty interestingly.

Drew Hall: Nice. So owners can create more flexibility by treating vendor platforms as part of an operating environment, rather than allowing any single platform to define the limits of your environment. So build versus buy, that's always a question, right? But I mean, it's really too simplistic to think about it. There's so many like hybrid options that it's a sprinkle of both in so many cases. You can buy strong platforms while still deciding how those platforms connect to the rest of the business. And the goal is flexibility, not reinventing everything internally. You can still use those best-in-class vendors. The difference is that the vendor becomes one component of your environment rather than the place where everything begins and ends.

Bill Douglas: I couldn't agree more. And I would be careful to not hear this clip and conclude that everybody needs to become a software developer. That's not why we're advocating the clip. I would hear it as an example of an operator wanting more flexibility than the standard application gave them. I can tell you from firsthand experience trying to be a software developer and operator, it's a whole nother business and I wouldn't choose it by any means. But the goal isn't independence from vendors. You need great vendors. The goal is making sure one vendor's architecture doesn't determine everything you're allowed to do within your own portfolio.

Bill Douglas: David's team had specific workflows and information needs that were not completely addressed by what he was being served up as the standard platform. So API Access gave them another option, and that's what becomes possible when owners have access to the underlying data, to the underlying information.

Drew Hall: Yeah, and that this owner-controlled environment that we're striving toward, it just opens up a whole new world. Use those different vendors for different functions, as we say. Yes, yes. Connect those tools. Yes, yes. Replace one without rebuilding everything else. You can preserve your operating history. All along, you're building your internal analytics.

Drew Hall: And then of course you can introduce AI capabilities as it benefits you. Don't feel pressured also to do that right away. You know, you want to get that underlying structure in place, as we say, before you put AI on top of it, because it's just going to reveal those weaknesses if you do it too early. So who often knows first where those limitations are creating problems? Well, it's the people that are dealing with the property every single day. And so that's a big part of what Suman Gidhwani brought into conversation here from our clip number 9. So Suman is A technology and innovation leader spanning IBM, Irrational Labs, and NYSERDA.

Suman Gidwani: Innovation in the real estate space, in the commercial real estate space, happens much less by developers and much more by asset managers, energy providers, technology partners, and operating partners. And, you know, you think about developers, their horizons are long, their time horizons are long. And when you think about operators, their time horizons are on the day-to-day, right? They are thinking about what's happening with the building every single day. Well, what we learned from Suman is that a great deal of meaningful innovation originates close to the operating problem. Not in the skybox, as we like to talk about in the book, but from the field, right? From the players and the coaches. At the same time, property-level experimentation needs an ownership framework. Otherwise, different properties solve the same issue in incompatible ways that are not replicable or scalable. And owners need a way to turn local learning into portfolio-level capability.

Drew Hall: Yeah. Well, and these operators have a much shorter feedback loop than many other participants in the lifecycle of the asset itself. So the operators see failures, friction, and inefficiencies constantly, day after day after day. And that makes operational problems a useful starting point for innovation. Many strong technology use cases begin with an ordinary recurring problem. And honestly, some of the best technology conversations we've had on this show didn't even start with the technology. It started with someone saying this part of operating the property is harder than it should be. And they're just looking for relief from that.

Bill Douglas: Yeah. And another thing we've heard consistently is that innovation should come from the operating problem. Standards should come from ownership. Like again, innovation should come from the operating problem, right? That combination can create learning at the property level without increasing fragmentation across So our final clip, I can't believe we're already on number 10, but final clip brings the conversation back to the asset itself. Once the owner controls more of the technology and the actual information environment, what does that capability ultimately become worth? And this is Chad Stafford, President of Occidental Management, who oversees nearly 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate office assets. The technology that you own and can provide not only adds asset value, but also customer value.

Drew Hall: So yes, owner-controlled technology can become part of both the operating value and the customer value of the real estate. And that customer side is important. Better systems can improve reliability, responsiveness, and the experience of occupying the property, that tenant experience that we always talk about. And that can ultimately affect leasing, obviously retention and how the asset competes, how it performs against its competitors in the market. Yeah. So technology should support both operating performance and value creation. That's a very different way to think about the technology environment. Instead of asking what software do we have, you're asking what this property is capable of doing because of the digital infrastructure underneath it.

Bill Douglas: Well, that's what I enjoyed about the show with Chad is that He was an early adopter in the industry of the value of digital infrastructure. And he saw not just how it drove the asset, but the NOI he could get from it. So they made the right investments early in this property when they acquired it, I don't know, 6 or 7 years ago. And he took the conversation way beyond cost savings, although cost savings are part of it. He took it to income derivation and cost savings, both impacting NOI. So technology and digital infrastructure can become capabilities of the asset itself, right? Those capabilities can affect how efficiently the property operates. And what tenant experience it can provide. When ownership controls the digital foundation, those capabilities remain with the property instead of disappearing when a vendor relationship changes or an employee changes or a large tenant, an anchor tenant changes, right? And if this capability stays with the property, makes the asset operate better, serve customers better, and adapt more easily, that's a hugely valuable part of the asset.

Drew Hall: Absolutely. And this is a natural conclusion to these 10 clips that we've highlighted here. We started this episode with the idea that real estate has become more operational. And we're ending with the idea that the technology and information foundation supporting those operations can itself contribute to asset and customer value.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, when you put these 10 conversations together, there's a progression that we couldn't have seen as clearly when we were recording each episode individually. And we did not know or see when we wrote the book and published it a year and a half ago, right? We started with the idea that operating performance is becoming more important to Yeah.

Drew Hall: And then you hear what that means at the property level. People need better information. Decisions get more expensive when the information is weak and AI just raises the stakes. Like we've, like we said, it shines the light on the issue. Got to fix that underlying issue. In many cases, owners discover that they don't have as much control over the underlying information as they thought they did.

Bill Douglas: Yeah. And from there, the opportunity starts to become even more clear. Like asset managers want to see things early enough to act. Instead of react. Owners need information that can challenge their assumptions. Operators need the freedom to solve real problems, not just noise or some KPI that might be archaic, right? And the technology environment has to be flexible enough to support all of that. The digital infrastructure and the data generated from it has to be collected, managed, and operated in a way that, that augments all of this.

Drew Hall: And that gets us to something that we've talked about a lot from different directions over these past 49 episodes. And that is one word, control.

Bill Douglas: That's probably the biggest theme I hear. When I look back at these conversations or when you and I have conversations anywhere, whether it's a customer, a prospect, a conference, a trade show, anything, do you understand the systems operating across your assets? And it seems simple, but it's a hard question to answer. Can you access the information that all of those systems are generating? So we talk a lot about silos. Is your data siloed or is it aggregated? Can you trust it? Can you connect to those systems, right? Can you preserve the data? How are you getting it? What format? Is it clean? Can you decide how it gets used? Not just now, but in perpetuity. Can you bring new technology into the portfolio without starting over every time? We've all done that. We know how painful that is. And ultimately, does all of that help you operate the asset better or is it just an expense? Like we hear so many times, technology is an expense. I want to minify it.

Bill Douglas: I want to minimize that expense. And we continue to say digital infrastructure and the data it provides is an asset that should have a positive return, a positive ROI. And that's what we've been getting at with Clarify Connect. Collect, coordinate, and control the 5 C's. Yeah.

Drew Hall: And the good news is that none of this requires owners. Like we said before, you don't have to become technology companies yourself. It just requires you to treat technology, the data, and the digital infrastructure as part of the operating environment that they're responsible for.

Bill Douglas: Exactly. Like use great vendors. We're not saying you should replace any vendors unless they don't want to play on your new field, but use great technology, bring AI in if and when it creates value, but only after you have control of your digital infrastructure. Only after you have control of all the data that your assets are providing... generating, I mean. But understand the foundation that those things are sitting on and make sure ownership retains control of what matters.

Drew Hall: Yeah, I think that's a pretty good summary of what we've learned in these first 49 episodes. And we're obviously not done. Technology is changing. Market is changing. Expectations on owners and operators are changing. So going to be a lot more conversations to have going forward for sure.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, and we look forward to those conversations. And to every guest who's been part of the past 49 episodes, a sincere thank you. And to everyone who has listened, subscribed, shared an episode, or joined the conversation, thank you too. Please continue to do that to help us get the message out. The whole reason we started this podcast, the Peak Property Performance Podcast, and the movement was to create a place for these kinds of conversations and bring more of the industry's operating knowledge out into the open.

Drew Hall: Yeah. And I think we say at the top of every show, just about, is like, we're out here to change an industry. We're not just talking to talk because we've got some good things to say. So we really are working on changing that industry that so, so readily needs it. So if any of these clips made you think about your own portfolio differently, send the episode to somebody else who should be part of that conversation. And if you're doing something in commercial real estate that other owners and operators can learn from, just reach out to us.

Bill Douglas: Yeah, reach out to us and Get on the show and share it with other people. This conversation should elevate the industry. We're 50 episodes down, a lot more to learn. Be sure to like, follow, subscribe, you know, click the bell to find out... they'll be notified when new episodes come. Share it with your friends and your colleagues, encourage them to be on the show. And we look forward to next episode of 51 of Peak Property Performance. Thank you again, everybody.