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How Real Estate Investment Teams Lose Deals to Disconnected Data
By: Adam Dermer
You get an email from a broker about an off-market opportunity. The asset looks familiar: you’ve underwritten something like it in the same submarket before. But, when you search your shared drive, nothing comes up. You ask around and no one can point you in the right direction. The clock is ticking, and by the time you track down what you need, you’re behind the eight ball.
I’ve spent years in real estate development and investments, and I’ve seen this story play out more times than I can count. Deals don’t slip away because someone else is smarter — they slip away because someone else can move faster because they have better access to their own information.
The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation
Commercial real estate investors sit on goldmines of market intelligence: years of underwriting models, rent rolls, broker notes, and assumptions that could sharpen every bid. But most of that data is locked away in scattered systems and forgotten files.
Spreadsheets, PDFs, and inboxes might feel “organized enough,” but when your information lives in silos, it’s not working for you - it’s working against you. You end up wasting time chasing the right numbers, relying on outdated assumptions, and dealing with data that’s nearly impossible to use in its unstructured form.
In a competitive market, that friction shows up as three things: delayed execution, lower accuracy, and reduced conviction.
Where Silos Hurt the Most
Speed
When critical deal data lives in ten different places, analysts spend hours chasing information that should take seconds to retrieve. Every extra step slows the path from OM to IC and when it comes to locking up the most attractive opportunities, timing is everything.
Accuracy
Disconnected data creates inconsistent assumptions. One model pulls outdated market rents; another uses outdated cap rates. Without a single source of truth, every deal carries unnecessary risk.
Learning
Each deal becomes a one-off exercise. Institutional knowledge that should compound over time — past underwriting, passed deals, market lessons — disappears into inboxes and shared drives.
Why It Happens
It’s not that deal teams don’t value data , it’s that they just don’t have the infrastructure to manage it effectively. Even the best of firms often rely on:
- Shared drives acting as digital junk drawers
- CRMs that track do not track investor/lender criteria
- Analysts building models and using different assumptions in isolation
- Process workflows run entirely through email
The result? Everyone has part of the truth, but no one has the truth.
The Competitive Gap
The firms that are winning today aren’t necessarily seeing more opportunities — they’re just operating from one connected source of truth.
They’re not wasting time chasing old models or guessing at assumptions; they’re leveraging structured deal data to underwrite faster, bid with confidence, and walk into IC meetings with conviction.
Having lived through that shift firsthand, I can tell you: the energy of a team that trusts its own data is completely different. They move faster, argue less, and win more.
Reclaiming Your Advantage
Solving this problem doesn’t mean adopting “more tech.” It means connecting what you already have.
Modern deal management platforms like Origin by Altrio turn unstructured, scattered information into structured institutional knowledge. Every offering memorandum, rent roll, comp, and contact becomes part of your firm’s collective intelligence — searchable, comparable, and actionable in seconds.
That means:
- Faster screening and underwriting with trusted data
- Real-time visibility across every deal in your pipeline
- Consistency and confidence in every decision
From Information to Advantage
In commercial real estate, deals move at the speed of information. Firms that unify their data don’t just move faster — they make smarter, more confident decisions. And as more teams explore AI to enhance their workflows, one thing has become clear: you can’t unlock the value of AI without first unlocking your data.
And as someone who’s been on both sides of that divide, I can tell you this: the difference between “organized chaos” and “structured clarity” is often the difference between closing the deal and coming in second.
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