Turning Building Data Into a Stronger Campus Asset

Most owners know their buildings are full of systems. Fewer know what those systems are actually saying. At Esperia, Occidental Management’s 200-acre corporate campus in Overland Park, Kansas, the difference between “owning buildings” and operating a modern asset shows up every day in the details: 17 office buildings, 14 parking decks, a power plant, a 70,000-square-foot fitness center, extensive fiber, conference space, utilities, outdoor work areas, and tenants who expect the experience to feel seamless. On Episode 39 of Peak Property Performance®, we sat down with Chad Stafford, President of Occidental Management, to talk about what happens when an owner treats digital infrastructure, data visibility, and operational intelligence as core asset strategy—not back-office overhead. You can listen to the full episode here.

A 4 Million Square Foot “Skyscraper Flipped on Its Side”

When Occidental acquired the former Sprint headquarters campus in July 2019, they were buying one of the largest corporate campuses in the country. Then, seven months later, the world changed. Chad described the period after the COVID lockdowns as eerie: a campus built for nearly 11,500 people a day suddenly felt like a ghost town. That matters because large assets do not pause just because occupancy drops. Utilities still run. Infrastructure still ages. Tenants still need support. Capital decisions still have to be made.

Esperia is not a typical office property. It is, as Chad put it, a small city. The campus includes 3.8 million square feet across 200 acres, 17 office buildings averaging just over 200,000 square feet each, approximately 14,000 structured parking spaces, its own power plant, a warehouse, ponds, walking trails, indoor and outdoor collaboration areas, cafeterias, conference space, and one of the largest corporate fitness centers in America. That kind of environment cannot be managed with clipboard rounds and disconnected vendor portals.

“Troy Marquis, our CFO, his favorite thing is this is a 4 million foot skyscraper flipped on its side because there is a lot of interconnectivity.”

That line captures the operating reality. A vertical office tower has risers, telecom rooms, central systems, elevators, tenant floors, mechanical dependencies, and shared infrastructure. Esperia has many of those same dependencies spread horizontally across a campus. The owner still has to understand what is connected, what is fragile, what is valuable, and what must be controlled directly. The difference is scale, distance, and complexity.

This is where many commercial real estate owners hit a wall. They can see the roof, parking lot, lobby, and HVAC equipment. But they often cannot see the digital systems that increasingly drive leasing, tenant experience, security, operating efficiency, and long-term asset value. The reframe is simple: If you don’t own your data & digital infrastructure, your vendors do.

Digital Infrastructure Became Part of the Property’s Service Offering

One of the biggest discoveries after Occidental acquired the campus was the fiber. There was extensive fiber infrastructure already in place—what Chad described as “an eight-foot tube stuffed full of fiber optics.” But fiber alone is not a strategy. As we discussed on the episode, the campus had bones, but not joints and not a brain. The physical pathways and strands existed, but the active systems, architecture, controls, and operating model had to be built.

This is an important distinction for owners. Having fiber in the ground is not the same as owning a digital infrastructure platform. Having vendors in the building is not the same as having visibility. Having tenants call their own internet providers is not the same as turning connectivity into an asset-level service. Occidental saw the opportunity to move from a passive landlord model—“rent the space and call a carrier”—to an owner-led model where connectivity, security, flexibility, and campus-wide access became part of the Esperia experience.

The practical example Chad shared is exactly the kind of shift owners should pay attention to. A 40,000- or 50,000-square-foot tenant can have employees work from virtually anywhere on campus while still operating as if they are sitting at their desk. They can be in their office, outside, near the fitness center, in a shared area, or at a coffee spot, and still remain behind that tenant’s firewall, directory services, identity management, and security policies. They can print, access systems, and work securely without the experience breaking as they move around.

“How would you like it if you’re a 40, 50,000 square foot user, but we can, with your own firewall, set you up so your employees can work anywhere on campus like they’re sitting at their desk?”

That is not a technology gimmick. That is a leasing advantage, a tenant retention tool, and an operational differentiator. It supports how people actually work now. It also helps the tenant’s HR and leadership teams tell a better story: come into the office because the campus gives you flexibility, amenities, secure mobility, and a better workday than sitting at home. For owners, that is where digital infrastructure starts tying directly to asset performance.

Operational Visibility Is No Longer Optional

At campus scale, operational visibility becomes the difference between proactive ownership and expensive reaction. Chad explained that Esperia’s building automation system now tracks roughly 51,000 data points at any given time. That includes the kinds of signals most tenants never see but absolutely feel: comfort, airflow, equipment performance, cooling issues, imbalance, and early indications that a component is starting to fail.

His example of a VAV box is a good one. In a traditional reactive model, the tenant complains that an area is too warm or too cold. A work order gets created. Engineering investigates. Maybe the issue has already affected employee comfort for days. Maybe it creates a bigger maintenance problem. At Esperia, the system can identify that a fan is not cooling correctly or that something is out of balance before it becomes a tenant-facing failure. That is operational intelligence in plain English: knowing sooner, acting earlier, and reducing disruption.

This is where the PPP 5C™ framework becomes useful. Owners first have to Clarify what systems exist and what outcomes they need. Then they Connect the infrastructure so systems can communicate. They Collect the right data—not just more data, but usable operating signals. They Coordinate teams, vendors, and workflows around that information. Finally, they Control the environment, the standards, and the decision-making model so the asset is not dependent on fragmented third parties.

• Clarify: What infrastructure did we inherit, and what is business-critical?
• Connect: How do building systems, networks, tenant services, and operations work together?
• Collect: Which data points help us prevent failures, improve experience, and guide capital planning?
• Coordinate: Who responds when the data shows a problem, and how fast?
• Control: What must the owner govern directly to protect asset value?

For Occidental, that visibility supports both day-to-day service and long-term capital planning. Large campuses require owners to make decisions about replacing infrastructure, modernizing systems, upgrading tenant-facing services, and minimizing disruption. Better data helps prioritize those investments. It also helps avoid the trap of spending capital based on who complained loudest or which vendor happened to identify a problem first.

Turning Connectivity Into a Tenant Experience Advantage

One of the most important shifts at Esperia was realizing the campus was not just “wired.” It was capable of supporting a fundamentally different tenant experience. Chad explained that the campus had extraordinary fiber assets underneath it, but those assets were underutilized. Once Occidental understood what was possible, digital infrastructure became part of the leasing conversation—not a technical footnote after the deal was signed.

“The best thing is how would you like it if you’re a 40, 50,000 square foot user, but we can, with your own firewall, set you up so your employees can work anywhere on campus like they’re sitting at their desk?”

That is not a theoretical amenity. It means a tenant’s employees can work from the fitness center, a conference area, an outdoor workspace, or another building on campus while staying behind the tenant’s firewall, directory services, and identity management. They can print, access secure systems, and operate as if they are at their assigned desk. For companies trying to bring people back to the office, recruit talent, and give employees more flexibility without sacrificing security, that is a real advantage.

From our perspective, this is what happens when an owner stops treating connectivity as the tenant’s problem. In too many buildings, the process is still: lease the space, call a carrier, wait for circuits, pull more cable, crowd the risers, hope the installation is clean, and accept that every tenant has a different stack of vendors. At Esperia, Occidental owns the core infrastructure and tenants consume it as a property service. That changes the economics, the speed, the reliability, and the control model.

This is the reframe every owner should sit with: If you don’t own your data & digital infrastructure, your vendors do. At Esperia, Occidental made the decision to own the backbone, set the standards, protect the raceways, manage access, and monetize the infrastructure in a way that benefits both the owner and the tenant. That is the difference between infrastructure as a cost center and infrastructure as asset strategy.

The Building Started Talking Back

Connectivity is only one layer. The next layer is operational intelligence. Chad talked about the new building automation system installed across the campus and the scale of what it monitors. The BMS alone tracks tens of thousands of points, and when you add the other operating systems—access control, network systems, lighting, security, and more—the data footprint becomes much larger. The important part is not the number. The important part is whether the owner can actually use the data.

“We had to install a new building automation system that tracks 51,000 data points at a given time. That thing is wired to the point where we know before a VAV box is going to shoot craps in a tenant space.”

That is the practical version of “smart building” that owners should care about. Not dashboards for dashboards’ sake. Not a new portal nobody checks. A real operational signal: this fan is not cooling properly, this zone is trending out of range, this piece of equipment is going to become a tenant complaint if we do not address it. When the system can surface those warnings early, the team can shift from reactive maintenance to preventative maintenance.

This is where the PPP 5C™ framework becomes useful. Owners need to Clarify what systems they have and what outcomes matter. They need to Connect the systems so data is not trapped in separate vendor platforms. They need to Collect the right data in a usable way. They need to Coordinate action across engineering, property management, leasing, and capital planning. And they need to Control the infrastructure, access, standards, and vendor environment so the asset does not become dependent on fragmented third parties.

That last point matters. A building management system may generate the data, but the owner should not have to leave the data locked inside a vendor’s box. Access control data, lighting data, Wi-Fi data, energy data, and mechanical data all tell different parts of the same story. When those systems are connected responsibly, with privacy and security handled correctly, owners get a much clearer picture of building performance and tenant utilization.

What Owners Can Learn From Esperia

Esperia is a 200-acre campus, but the lesson is not limited to mega-campuses. We see the same principles apply in a 100,000-square-foot building, a multi-tenant office tower, a medical office property, an industrial portfolio, or a mixed-use asset. The scale changes. The operating model does not. Owners who treat data & digital infrastructure like real infrastructure gain more control, create better tenant outcomes, and open up new revenue opportunities.

Chad described how tenants used to come in expecting to bring their own carrier, pull their own service, and solve everything themselves. Now the conversation is different. The infrastructure is already there. The service can be activated quickly. If a tenant needs to move across campus, the move can be handled through the existing backbone instead of starting over with new construction and new cabling. In one example, Chad said they could support a critical infrastructure user that needed to be operational in seven days. For an owner, speed to occupancy is not just convenient. It is competitive advantage.

The same applies to utilization data. During and after COVID, investors, lenders, tenants, and leadership teams all wanted to know how space was actually being used. Guesswork was not enough. At Esperia, access control data helped show who was coming into which buildings and when. Other systems can validate density and presence in anonymized ways, including lighting controls and Wi-Fi. That gives ownership a better basis for leasing strategy, amenity planning, energy management, and capital allocation.

For owners asking where to start, the answer is not “buy more technology.” Start by taking inventory. What systems are in the building? Who owns the cabling? Who controls the risers? Where does the data live? Which vendors have administrative access? Can tenants get reliable, redundant service quickly? Can your team see equipment issues before tenants complain? Can you prove utilization to a lender or investor? These are not IT questions. These are ownership questions.

The larger theme is the same one we explore in the Peak Property Performance® book and in conversations across the Peak Property Performance® Podcast: modern commercial real estate performance depends on the infrastructure owners choose to control. Roofs, roads, parking lots, and mechanical systems still matter. But so do fiber, pathways, data rights, cybersecurity, operating systems, access standards, and the intelligence layer that helps the building communicate what is happening.

Here are the actionable takeaways for CRE owners:

• Treat data & digital infrastructure as asset infrastructure. If it supports tenant experience, operations, leasing, resilience, or revenue, it deserves ownership-level attention.
• Own the core backbone where possible. Do not let every tenant and vendor create a permanent mess in your risers, pathways, and telecom rooms.
• Make infrastructure part of the leasing strategy. Speed, security, redundancy, mobility, and flexibility can differentiate your asset.
• Collect operational data outside vendor silos. Your BMS, access control, lighting, network, and energy systems should help you make better decisions.
• Use data to move from reactive to preventative operations. The goal is fewer surprises, fewer tenant complaints, and smarter capital planning.
• Monetize responsibly. When tenants get better, faster, more reliable service, infrastructure can become both a tenant benefit and an owner revenue stream.

Occidental did not create value at Esperia by chasing buzzwords. They did it by asking owner/operator questions: What do tenants need? What infrastructure do we already have? What should we control? Where is the data? How do we make the asset perform better? That is the mindset more owners need now. Because the buildings that win will not just be the ones with amenities. They will be the ones with infrastructure, intelligence, and control built into the operating model.

About OpticWise: OpticWise provides owner-controlled data & digital infrastructure for commercial real estate — from PPP Audits to portfolio-wide intelligence. See how we operate or read customer outcomes.