TL;DR: In a market where revenue growth is constrained and capital costs remain elevated, the controllable path to NOI improvement runs through operational efficiency: energy, maintenance, staffing, and turn costs. The owners who can measure, manage, and prove that efficiency hold an advantage this cycle. That requires owner-controlled data, not just additional tools.
For two decades, value creation in commercial real estate followed a dominant pattern: fill the building, raise rents, refinance at a lower cap rate. Operating expenses were a line item to monitor, not a strategic lever. That calculus has shifted. Revenue growth is harder in most markets, interest rates remain elevated, and expense pressure in utilities, insurance, labor, and materials continues to compound. The margin between a strong asset and a mediocre one often comes down to how tightly operations are run.
Where Operating Margin Hides in a Portfolio
Four categories consistently hold recoverable NOI across property types.
Energy. Utilities remain one of the largest controllable operating expenses. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that commercial buildings waste up to 30% of the energy they consume. The gap is not primarily technological. It is a visibility problem: owners cannot optimize consumption they cannot see at the interval, system, and tenant level. Real-time metering data, governed and accessible to the asset manager, turns energy from a bulk expense into a manageable operating driver.
Maintenance. Reactive maintenance (something breaks, someone fixes it) carries premium labor rates, expedited parts, and extended downtime. McKinsey has found that predictive maintenance can reduce costs by up to 20% and unplanned downtime by up to 50%. The prerequisite is operating data from building systems collected continuously, with enough history to identify patterns before failure occurs.
Staffing productivity. Labor is one of the fastest-growing expense categories in CRE. Without a consolidated operating view, tasks are duplicated, priorities are set by recency rather than impact, and administrative burden absorbs time that could go toward revenue-generating activities or resident experience.
Turn costs and velocity. In multifamily, every additional day a unit sits vacant costs rent and carrying costs. Most owners lack standardized visibility into where turns slow down: vendor scheduling, inspection approvals, materials procurement, or scope creep. Without data on bottlenecks, each turn is managed as a one-off rather than a repeatable process with measurable cycle times.
Why the Opportunity Stays Hidden
Operational efficiency does not surface naturally in the reports CRE is built around. Leasing reports, rent comps, and broker conversations focus on the top line. Operating data sits inside building systems, vendor platforms, and property-management software that often do not share a common data layer. The asset manager sees summary financials monthly. The granular signals that would reveal waste, delays, or optimization opportunities are either inaccessible or scattered across disconnected systems.
What Connected Data Changes
Operational efficiency at portfolio scale requires connected systems and real-time data the owner controls. Deloitte highlights that organizations using integrated data and automation see meaningful gains in productivity and cost efficiency. The qualifier: tools alone do not produce that result. When systems are added without integration into an owner-controlled data layer, the result is more dashboards, more logins, and less clarity. The value comes from consolidation: a single operating view where energy, maintenance, staffing, and turn performance are measurable against the same timeline and the same asset. When that foundation exists, efficiency improvements are measurable, repeatable across assets, and provable to lenders and LPs at refinancing or disposition.
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Bill Douglas is the CEO of OpticWise, where he leads the company's mission to help commercial real estate owners take control of their data and digital infrastructure. With over three decades of entrepreneurial experience and a track record of leading companies onto the Inc. 5000 list, Bill brings a systems-minded, owner-first approach to everything OpticWise delivers. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and is a graduate of MIT's Enterprise Forum Entrepreneurial Masters Program. Bill is the co-author of Peak Property Performance (Fast Company Press).
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