Why do so many asset managers keep building technology at arm’s length? That was the central question in this episode, and the answer turns out to be less about the technology itself and more about language, incentives, and mindset.
We sat down with Lachlan Macquarrie, a former asset manager, educator of asset managers, and someone who now operates on the front lines of CRE technology.
Technology Is Not a Vendor Problem
Lachlan McQuary, who spent roughly a decade at Oxford Properties Group, opened with a sharp observation: the moment an asset manager treats technology as a vendor problem, they have already decided not to build a competitive advantage with it.
Commercial real estate has a long tradition of outsourcing, property management, leasing, building automation, access control, and technology tends to get lumped in with every other contracted service. The asset manager is focused on advancing an investment thesis: growing net operating income (NOI), containing risk, and driving value. Technology rarely shows up in that conversation because it sits in a different frame, spoken about in a different language.
Rob Murchison offered a useful analogy. Imagine outsourcing your entire electrical infrastructure and then having your building operators know nothing about it. That is effectively what happens with digital infrastructure in most commercial buildings today. Electrical, water, lighting, and HVAC systems all depend on digital layers, yet nobody owns the holistic picture.
The Language Gap
One of the most practical insights from the discussion was that the core barrier is not technical, it is linguistic. Sustainability consultants, technology vendors, operations engineers, and asset managers all speak different languages. An asset manager thinks in NOI, hold periods, and valuations. A technology vendor thinks in protocols, platforms, and integrations. When nobody translates between those frames, conversations stall or miss each other entirely.
Lachlan argued that the asset manager is the natural person to close this gap. They sit at the intersection of property operations, leasing, capital planning, and financial performance. If an asset manager can connect how technology links to value, everyone else at the table can start to see the picture from a shared perspective. The same logic applies to sustainability: nobody wants to “decarbonize” in the abstract, they want to understand how it affects cash flow, operations, and asset value.
The Oxford Properties Journey
Back in 2012, Lachlan partnered with Intelligent Buildings and Cisco to assess the digital capability of Oxford’s Canadian portfolio, high-quality retail and office assets. Nothing was fundamentally broken. But the assessment revealed that building systems were not connected, data was abundant but unused for decision-making, and operational performance varied wildly across assets despite having skilled teams and established standards.
The business case for investing in converged base building networks was not built on a neat ROI spreadsheet. Lachlan was candid: proving a return on transformational capability is difficult. Instead, the case rested on avoided risk, directional value, and a stepped approach, the argument that if you want to reach a more capable operating model, you have to start building the foundation now. There was, he admitted, an element of trust involved, plus good timing as capital expenditure cycles aligned with the opportunity to refresh infrastructure.
When fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) rolled out across 16 or 17 assets, adoption was uneven. Some younger, tech-savvy engineers embraced the dashboards immediately. Others remained skeptical for months. The turning point was not the data itself but the moment an operations engineer realized the system could solve a problem they had been living with for years. That shift, from “this is noise” to “this helps me do my job”, was where skepticism turned into ownership.
Advice for Asset Managers
We closed with practical guidance for any asset manager who knows they should be doing more with technology but is unsure where to begin:
Start with outcomes, not tools. This is a journey of building capabilities, not purchasing products. Define what you want to achieve; tenant retention, energy performance, operational consistency. And work backward from there.
Get help early. An asset manager does not need to become a technology expert. The landscape changes constantly. Partner with people who have been through the challenges and can offer a broader perspective.
Invest in foundations. Connectivity, access to data, basic visibility, and cyber security are not glamorous, but they are the infrastructure everything else depends on.
Find an owner internally. Someone has to champion the digital strategy. For most organizations, the asset manager is the logical choice because they already connect property management, leasing, finance, and ownership.
Skip the pilot mentality. If your instinct is to run a technology pilot, you may be starting in the wrong place. The real conversation is about treating digital infrastructure as a strategic asset, not about testing the latest shiny product.
Don’t be afraid of not knowing. Lachlan’s parting thought was personal. He had never addressed technology before he chose to. The willingness to be curious, ask questions, and learn along the way matters far more than having all the answers up front.
The overarching message was clear: for an asset manager, technology is not an end goal. It is an enabler of the outcomes that already matter; stable income, satisfied tenants, lower risk, and long-term value growth. The buildings that will compete best over the next decade are the ones where someone decided to own that story.
