Nearly One-Third of CRE Asset Managers Make Major Capital Decisions on Gut Instinct, New Survey Finds

CHICAGO - EntSun -- SITE Technologies, a provider of AI-assisted asset intelligence solutions for commercial real estate, today published The CapEx Intelligence Gap, a research report on how commercial real estate teams reach capital planning decisions, where portfolio visibility falls short, and what reactive spending costs owners over time.

The report draws on survey responses from 166 commercial real estate professionals working in operations, property management, asset management, procurement, and capital planning. Across that group, the findings show a gap between how confident organizations feel about their CapEx planning and how much condition-level data actually supports those plans.

Taken together, the 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.

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Key Findings

• 29% 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.

"The most surprising finding is not that operators are spending reactively — everyone in the industry knows emergency CapEx is a problem," said Austin Rabine, Chief Executive Officer 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."

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The report also looks at where artificial intelligence is being put to work in commercial real estate. Most of the industry conversation to date has centered on lease abstraction, tenant communications, and back-office workflows. The CapEx Intelligence Gap 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.

For owners and operators with assets spread across many locations, the report makes the case that condition-based intelligence is what moves capital planning off the reactive repair cycle and onto a proactive, evidence-based footing.

The CapEx Intelligence Gap is available for free download at https://sitetechnologies.io/capex-intelligence-report-intro/