The reporting paradox: How to ensure property teams spend more time using data than gathering it

James Pellatt, founder of Digital Trees, has spent his career untangling a problem most property teams don’t even realise they have, one he calls “the reporting paradox.” He joins us on the new season of Built to Perform to explain the challenge and how to solve it.

Teams brought in to manage buildings often end up managing spreadsheets instead. At one previous employer, James found staff losing a day, sometimes a day and a half, every single week simply gathering information rather than acting on it, a figure he’s since seen creep closer to two days a week on some teams. That’s nearly half a working week spent producing reports instead of resolving the problems those reports are meant to reveal.

To demonstrate just how much that gap costs, James points to two developments of comparable scale, built at the same time and roughly a mile apart. One used coordinated design data from the outset and issued only four variations across the entire build, finishing two weeks late. The other, without that same discipline, ended up 33 weeks late. Same market, same conditions. The outcome came down almost entirely to the quality of the information behind the decisions being made.

He applies the same scrutiny to where the industry’s attention currently sits. On AI specifically, his verdict is refreshingly blunt: “Right now, 20% of it is probably real and 80% is theatre”, a reminder that new technology matters far less than the basic discipline of knowing what’s happening in your own building.

He illustrates this point with the story of a single faulty smart meter and the five-figure monthly discrepancy it produced simply because everyone assumed a smart meter meant accurate data.

James Pellatt is equally clear on the timeline for this kind of complacence catching up with the industry. As specialists in building technology, we regularly see how better visibility of building performance data can improve operational decision-making. Borrowing a line usually applied to companies going bankrupt, he warns that falling behind on data and technology happens the same way: slowly, then very quickly. The risk goes unnoticed or ignored, for years, then arrives all at once. By which point it’s too late to close the gap cost-effectively.

It’s a conversation with a clear message for anyone managing large portfolios: the returns on better technology are real, but they start with better data discipline and a human eye, not the other way around.