Beyond PropTech: Why Digital Infrastructure and Data Control Matter for Your Buildings

Introduction to Peak Property Performance Podcast

Lane Taylor: Welcome to Peak Property Performance, everybody. This is your host, Lane Taylor, but I am not your host of the Peak Property Performance. I have the two hosts with me today, and I'm going to help guide this incredible conversation on episode one of this podcast that actually goes along with a book, and I'm really excited to introduce you to Bill Douglas and Drew Hall. So who am I? It's not going to matter who I am, but I've been with Bill and Drew helping launch this podcast, taking their vision all the way to episode one, and I'm really excited to align with these two businessmen and really talk about what they're trying to accomplish with the Peak Property Performance podcast. The Peak Property Performance, they're going to dive into AI, data, digital infrastructure, and how reshaping commercial real estate is going on. They are leaders of OpticWise, and like I said, authors of the Peak Property Performance book. This podcast, listen, so when we were doing all of this stuff, trying to get them up and running with their podcast, they specifically had goals of what the audience wanted and what the audience was going to walk away from. So this podcast is going to unpack the strategies that help commercial real estate owners reduce costs, increase NOI, and future proof their properties. So if that is you, you need to tune in, you need to subscribe, and I need to introduce you to the official host of the Peak Property Performance podcast, Bill Douglas and Drew Hall. Guys, welcome to your show. How does it feel?

Bill: Thanks for having us on our show, Rainn. Yeah, for real, for real. It's just, yeah, all that crowd noise in the background, I don't know if that's making it through, but it's got to be 20 to 30,000 in the audience just shredding it right now, just clapping. They're clapping, they're shredding, and this has been highly anticipated, you're going to break the internet today. How about that?

Drew: Right. Yes, yes. Well, guys, I said this episode, when people listen to this, they're going to get a glimpse of really who you all are, the vision behind it, but then also if they hit subscribe or they come back and listen to more episodes, what are they going to walk away from? And so with that, Bill, I'm going to knock it over to you first. Tell the listeners a little bit, why this podcast? Why now?

Understanding the Vision Behind the Podcast

Bill: Well, we spend a lot of time with commercial real estate owners, whether they're clients or prospects or just, we like it optic-wise to ask a lot of questions and listen. And last year we were doing research, actually interviewing, we paid a third-party firm to interview clients and interview prospects. And most of what we heard back is the property owners wanted business intelligence. And when we asked further what that meant, they couldn't really clarify it. Most of the time, business intelligence, they wanted data-driven decisions is the bottom line. And in reality, they don't have the data. So why don't they have the data? Because they don't own and control the digital infrastructure. And by digital infrastructure, we mean all the networks in the building and all the physical and virtual systems generating data. So to do any business intelligence, we need to layer in AI and specifically machine learning, but we need to have the control of the digital infrastructure and the data that's being generated. So rather than fast forward a year and a half, when the book was published last week, the whole premise is to find out what you have, what you own and who controls it, and then move forward from there. And there's processes and systems, and these are things owners can do themselves. They don't have to hire us or anybody else. If they choose to, they choose to, but we give away how to do this through this process. And all of these conversations we'll have on the podcast with guests, not just with Drew and I, but with guests, we will discuss how that goes, challenges, wins, losses, oopses, everything in between.

Lane Taylor: Drew, from your standpoint, when you all were having those business intelligence conversations, and then now with the book coming out, what has been, let's say, the biggest aha moment through all of this process when helping commercial real individuals?

The Role of Business Intelligence in CRE

Drew: Yeah. Oh, man. There's quite a few of them. Honestly, I think I would say the real power of harnessing all the information that had been flowing somewhere, or maybe it wasn't flowing, but just harnessing that information, that data, as we're going to call it, over and over and over, and then doing something with it, making it actionable, like how much of a financial difference it can make in commercial real estate. Some of those things might be kind of obvious, but there's a lot of them that aren't. It's pretty impressive, the differences that can be made by sometimes just making one little mod over here or capturing something that you didn't even realize you weren't capturing.

Clarifying the Non-PropTech Focus

Bill: Well, this is not a PropTech podcast. Let's clarify that in the beginning. You asked what it was, and I'll say what it's not. PropTech is an industry in and of itself, a lot of software, a lot of solutions that are very specific for commercial real estate operations, leasing, whatever. PropTech has to run on a digital infrastructure, may or may not generate data, but it's going to use data. You have to think the infrastructure layer below all of that. This isn't the noise of the PropTech and the virtual showings or control systems, things like that. It is the infrastructure layer owned by the property and the data generated by the property.

Lane Taylor: That's good. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad that you kind of laid that groundwork there, and obviously you guys are going to get into it. I may hop on here every once in a while and help listen to conversations or guide conversations, but I have had the opportunity to get to know you both through this onboarding process, and podcasting is fun. It is awesome. You can get information out there. You can add value to people. Truthfully, it's like, hey, who are the people behind the microphone? Who are these individuals? They have families. They have life. They've done this business for a little bit. Drew, I'm going to kick it over to you. Let the listener know just a little bit about who you are, personal life. You can share as much as you want to, as little as you want to, but who is Drew Hall? People know who they're listening to.

Personal Backgrounds and Industry Insights

Drew: Yeah, definitely. Okay. Drew Hall is my name, yes, and I'm in this business. I think I would start back by saying, in terms of what interested me in the first place to get into anything in the world, if I rewind the clock to, oh, it's time to grow up, what do you want to do, Drew? I wanted to be a chiropractor. I wanted to be a chiropractor, and the reason I wanted to be a chiropractor was because I saw chiropractors make such a huge difference in direct family members' lives, so I was watching something happen. I was watching someone make a huge change for someone else that was real right in front of my eyes. That was what really intrigued me. Super long story short, that was not for me. I'm not meant for the medical profession. I won't go into it, but I visited and said, I'm out real quick, real quick, right? But I ended up wanting to make things connect, right? Fast forward, got into all this business, and family-wise, let's see, I am married, have two kiddos that are going into ninth and 10th grade right now. Pretty stoked about it because we just dropped them off this morning for camp, so not that that's awesome or anything, but that's awesome. So looking forward to the week ahead, and yeah, just happy to be here.

Lane Taylor: That's cool, and again, guys, if you're listening to this, and I help moderate these first couple episodes, it's just cool because I get to introduce you to people that you're going to be listening to, and in the business world, we're all humans, we all have families, we all have things that we're doing, and so this is really cool. So Drew, awesome. Bill, how about you give a little bit of breakdown of who Bill is behind the microphone?

Bill: I graduated from Georgia Tech, so I'm a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech. I know you're a Tennessee fan, but I won't hold that against you. I don't just like Tennessee, I just like Georgia, so who doesn't, right? I went to work for the power company in Florida after I graduated and was doing well there, but got bit by a coral snake and decided in that five-week recovery process to quit my job and become a real full-time entrepreneur, and I was side gig. So that was my first company when I was 27 years old, first real company with payroll, and I have been running companies ever since. So OpticWise is the sixth company I've been involved in. Most of them have done really well. I like using technology to solve big problems, and when Drew asked me to join, we saw this as a big problem for commercial real estate. You know, seven or eight years ago, we were doing digital infrastructure, we called it networks then, and we were doing Wi-Fi, and we scaled this into listening to the customer and solving larger and larger problems. So now we can drive revenue and we can reduce expenses, both of them positively impact NY while taking care of the tenants. So I fell in love with the prospect, not just the size of the market, but the application of technology to improve people's lives. So I have two adult sons. They're out of the house. I like to work out every day. I like live music. I like to travel. I like golf. I like riding my bike. So that's a little about me.

Lane Taylor: Well, I can tell, it's just interesting. I can tell hobbies of people that I get to talk with by how many kids are in the house. So the number of hobbies I feel like, that means you really don't have that many kids in the house right now. I've got two young kids, and so it's like, I get to work out, and right now that's my hobby and I love it. But Bill, you got a lot right now, so I can tell the kids are out of the house.

Bill: They are. They're out off the payroll, as they say, and independent. So Bill and Drew, let's pretend like no one is recording or listening to this right now. It's going to be a hard exercise because this is recording. So pretend like they're, no one's listening. What are the conversations that you guys are having behind closed doors to really help add value to your clients? What are those like? Like how, like what are you guys trying to do to really help your clients? Because I've seen it firsthand. I can tell you both care about your clients. You care about the business. You're into growing the business. You just wrote a book. I mean, what's it like to be in those meetings with you both and just talking about the client and what you want the client to do and succeed with?

Key Challenges in Commercial Real Estate

Drew: Yeah. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is just in terms of how a particular, if we have, we're talking about an existing client in terms of how they're working today, what do they have in place? Like what is working for them and what isn't working for them? So a lot of times it starts with hearing them talk about, oh man, this is going.

Bill: Right here, but what is this? Or this right here is just, it's annoying. And don't get me wrong, it's not like we solve all problems. But if it's something in the huge wheelhouse of things that are connected on the property, then it's very likely something that we can help influence. Very, very likely. So I think that it starts right there with listening. There are a lot of things to hear when you listen, because there are a lot of things that can be done, that can be taken advantage of in a positive way. Like, man, you've got some stuff in here that looks like it's pretty powerful, but it's just not being leveraged. Or maybe something was lost in the handoff from this ownership group to that ownership group, or from this management group to that management group. So a lot of things get left. And so a lot of times we're here kind of in the core, in terms of the life cycle of the property, like that property ain't leaving, it's going to be there for the long term. And so a lot of times we'll just gather as much information as we can, because we know that that information, that's keen. I said information again, I mean that data again, that's what we're talking about. So I think it starts right there with listening and try to understand what they can do really well or what they wish they could do better, those things.

Bill: Most of the time owners talk to me about the three big drivers of their expenses, occupancy, insurance, and utilities. So in occupancy, we emphasize that if you actually own the connectivity user experience or the technology user experience for your tenant, resident, guests, whatever you choose to call them through your property, then you have a lot more control of differentiation in the marketplace to start with. So when our client owned that, their occupancy goes up and stays up because they attract technology driven tenants. They're typically willing to pay more. And relative to insurance and utilities, those are the first two expense items we tackle using data. We typically see expense, like insurance premiums, instead of 10 to 12% like a year, we've seen them go down to just one or two with the right amount of data to the underwriter. That's a simple example. Utilities, all these buildings, especially the larger ones have a lot of common area utilities. And with the right data, you can trim that. You can see utility reductions as much as 10, 12% in the first year. So all three of those hit the NOI. One's on the revenue side and the other two on the expense side. And that's for starters. We call those the first three big plays. We talk about plays in the book because there's a lot of sports analogies. We try to give something that's worth investing the time and the money in, but certainly accomplishable right from the start. You don't want to pick one that's so big you fail. So those are the three things I most often talk about with owners.

Drew: I love that. I love it. And again, this is a world that I'm getting to know just because I'm getting to have conversations with you guys as you all launch this podcast. And I don't really want to get into the meat of a ton of stuff that you guys are going to talk about. This is really just a setting off point of the episode, but I always like to get nuggets away from episodes. And so if someone's still listening to this right now, and they're in the commercial estate business, what's like one nugget that you want to impart into that person right now? Bill, you kind of just alluded to it a little bit. Anything like you just want to say, this is July 1, 2025, which is crazy to think about that is already July 1st. Any nuggets around AI or anything that you feel like you would rock the world with right now in a nugget?

Data Ownership and Digital Infrastructure

Bill: Well, the two big questions in one idea nuggets at the very front of the book, which is the premise of everything we do is who owns and controls your data flow? Who owns and controls your digital infrastructure? And then imagine what you could do. And we give you 55 examples in the middle of the book. I'm sure we'll talk about them on the podcast, that and many more. But imagine what you could do if you were able to look across disparate data sources within your property and within your portfolio to draw conclusions and actually make actionable decisions that are data-driven, business intelligence, true business intelligence. So it's an imagine if, that's the big aha moment. But the two questions, who owns and controls your data and your digital infrastructure are key. Because most of the time, property owners don't. If they own it, they don't control it. Most often, they don't own and control both.

Drew: That's good. Drew, anything to add?

Encouragement to Explore and Innovate

Drew: Honestly, I was just thinking about the principle of don't be afraid to dig in. There's a lot there. There is a lot there. But like I said in the first answer, there is a lot of benefit to digging in. So don't be afraid to dig in. Prioritization is key.

Lane Taylor: Yeah. And you guys are going to dig in. I know it. I'm excited. You guys have been able to plot out the first episodes. I've been in the background of that. So guys, if you are listening to this right now, I know that these two gentlemen are going to add value. I'm excited to hear all the success, the following, and what they're going to be able to do. They are going to be your host. Again, I will pop in every once in a while, but peak property performance. I'm excited to watch the journey, see the journey, and see everything come from it. But before you head out of here, I've got two things that I need you to do if you stuck around with us. If you're on Apple, make sure that you subscribe and like the show. If you're on YouTube, make sure to subscribe and like the show. And then if you guys want to go follow Bill and Drew, maybe on LinkedIn to get more updates, make sure you go and do that too. So with that first episode, the jumping off point of the peak property performance, I'm excited to be involved with it, guys. I'm excited to see what happens from it. But until next time, we'll see you on the next episode of the peak property performance.