Flying without Instruments – August 31, 2026

There’s a persistent gap between CRE organizations’ confidence about their CapEx planning and actual condition-level data

“Capital planning in commercial real estate is increasingly constrained by incomplete visibility into asset condition, rising operational complexity, and the growing financial impact of reactive spending,” SITE Technologies says in a new white paper.  

“Across the industry, owners and portfolio managers are allocating billions of dollars in capital expenditures against aging infrastructure, rising costs, and increasing portfolio complexity. Yet most are making those allocation decisions without reliable, current data on the condition of the assets they own. The result is a cycle of reactive spending that erodes returns, inflates costs, and leaves portfolios exposed to preventable financial risk.” 

Titled The CapEx Intelligence Gap, the white paper draws on survey responses from 166 CRE professionals working in operations, property management, asset management, procurement and capital planning. The findings illustrate a broad-based theme: a gap between how confident organizations feel about their CapEx planning across geographically dispersed portfolios and how much condition-level data actually supports those plans. 

Among the key findings from the survey are the following: 

• 9% of asset managers regularly rely on gut instinct or informal assessment, rather than formal condition data, for significant capital planning decisions. 

• 69% of respondents have experienced capital expenditures that were higher than they would have been if maintenance had been addressed earlier. 

• 35% of respondents reported cost increases of 25% or more due to delayed maintenance. 

• 63% of respondents said more than 10% of annual CapEx was triggered by unplanned or emergency events. 

• 28% of respondents reported that more than a quarter of annual CapEx fell into the unplanned or emergency category. 

• Only 20% of respondents said their organizations have fully implemented predictive analytics or condition-based monitoring across their portfolios. 

• 66% of respondents estimate that real-time asset visibility would reduce unplanned capital expenditures by more than 10% annually. 

Taken together, the white paper says, these results describe an industry-wide problem: high-value capital decisions are still being made without consistent, portfolio-wide insight into the physical condition of assets. That leaves owners and operators exposed to emergency repairs, growing deferred maintenance backlogs, unreliable forecasts and value erosion at the point of sale.  

“The most surprising finding is not that operators are spending reactively — everyone in the industry knows emergency CapEx is a problem,” said Austin Rabine, CEO of SITE Technologies. “What is surprising is that the operators experiencing all the symptoms of a broken planning process simultaneously believe their five-year CapEx projections are solid.” 

The report also looks at where artificial intelligence is being put to work across the CRE industry. Most of the industry conversation around AI use to date has centered on lease abstraction, tenant communications and back-office workflows. SITE Technologies says its white paper points to “a use case with greater operational consequence: combining computer vision, machine learning, and engineering validation to assess the physical condition of capital-intensive assets objectively and consistently, at portfolio scale.” 

Or, as SITE Technologies chief revenue officer Miles Kirkpatrick writes in an introduction to the white paper, “AI shouldn’t just summarize your paperwork; it should be used to inject absolute objectivity and operational efficiency into what has historically been a highly subjective, slow and fragmented engineering process.”