4 Reasons High-Performing Buildings Are So Hard to Achieve (And How to Fix Them)

Every building owner wants the same thing: lower energy costs, comfortable tenants, and strong asset value. Yet most commercial buildings consistently underperform. Research suggests buildings routinely consume 25% more energy than predicted during design, with some consuming up to five times their expected usage.

The gap between what buildings could achieve and what they actually deliver is one of the industry's most persistent problems. Here are four reasons it's so hard to close and how to fix it.

1. Your Service Providers Aren't Incentivised to Help You Succeed

The people responsible for making your building perform well are often measured on things that have nothing to do with performance.

Facility management providers are typically judged on response times, work order completion, and complaint volumes. Energy efficiency rarely features as a core KPI. Some contracts are structured as a percentage of operational costs, which means when consumption drops, so does their fee.

Property managers are evaluated on tenant satisfaction and occupancy rates. When someone complains about being cold, the fastest path to closing that ticket is overriding the system rather than investigating the root cause.

IT teams focus on uptime and security, not whether the systems they maintain are running efficiently. Contractors get paid to fix problems, so a building with fewer issues means less work for them.

These aren't bad actors. They're responding rationally to how their success is measured. But the result is a building where nobody's goals are tied to actual performance outcomes.

What you (or your teams) can do:

• Review your service contracts and identify which KPIs are actually being measured
• Consider performance-based fees tied to verified efficiency improvements rather than percentage of spend
• Implement shared savings models that give providers upside when the building performs better
• Ensure at least some metrics relate to outcomes like energy efficiency or comfort, not just activity

2. Data Is Siloed Across Too Many Systems

A typical commercial building has data sitting in multiple places that don't talk to each other: the BMS, energy meters, access control systems, tenant billing platforms, maintenance management software.

Each system comes from a different vendor, uses different protocols, and stores data in different formats. Getting a complete picture of building performance means pulling information from all of these sources, normalising it, and checking it for accuracy.

That's a significant technical undertaking. Even when owners try, they often find that data from different systems doesn't match up, sensors have drifted out of calibration, or entire data streams are missing.

Without reliable, aggregated data, it's impossible to understand how the building is actually performing. You're left making decisions based on incomplete information or gut feel.

What you (or your teams) can do:

• Audit where your building data lives and what condition it's in
• Identify the critical data streams you need for performance management
• Check whether sensors are calibrated and data is accurate
• Consider platforms that can integrate data from multiple sources into a single view, but be realistic about the work involved in getting data quality right first

3. Reactive Culture Dominates

Most buildings are managed reactively. Something breaks, someone fixes it. A tenant complains, someone responds. Energy bills arrive, someone pays them. The entire operational model is built around responding to problems after they occur.

The numbers bear this out. Industry benchmarks suggest that only 20% of maintenance should be reactive, with 80% planned or preventive. In reality, teams spend somewhere between 34–45% of their time on reactive work. Reactive maintenance costs 25–30% more than preventive approaches due to emergency labour premiums, after-hours callouts, and rush parts orders.

Shifting to proactive management requires a different mindset. It means monitoring performance continuously, identifying issues before they become complaints, and making adjustments based on data rather than waiting for something to go wrong.

FM teams often don't have the time or headspace for this when they're consumed by daily firefighting.

What you (or your teams) can do:

• Review your maintenance logs to understand what percentage of work is reactive versus planned
• If the ratio is heavily skewed toward reactive, that's a sign the operational model needs to change
• Build time into FM contracts for preventive maintenance and performance monitoring
• Consider fault detection systems that can identify issues before they escalate

4. Nobody Translates Data Into Action

Even when buildings have good data and the right people can see it, that doesn't automatically lead to improvement.

Dashboards full of metrics don't tell you what to do next. A chart showing that energy consumption spiked last Tuesday doesn't explain why it happened or how to prevent it.

Turning building data into operational improvements requires expertise: someone who understands how building systems interact, can diagnose issues from patterns in the data, and knows which interventions will actually make a difference.

Most building owners don't have this capability in-house. Their service providers are focused on reactive maintenance rather than optimisation. The result is a data-action gap where information is available, but nothing changes.

According to research on the building performance gap, poor operational practices can affect energy use by 15–80%, making this one of the most significant factors in building underperformance.

What you (or your teams) can do:

• Recognise that data alone isn't enough; you need expertise to interpret it
• Look for service partners with genuine optimisation expertise, not just maintenance capability
• Consider specialists who can bridge the gap between data and action
• Start with a focused set of metrics that directly correlate with operational costs and comfort

Where Does This Leave You?

These four barriers reinforce each other. Misaligned incentives mean nobody prioritises performance. Siloed data makes it hard to see what's happening. Reactive culture keeps everyone focused on today's problems. And without expertise to interpret the data, nothing changes.

Addressing any one of these helps, but real progress comes from tackling them together. That means aligning contracts to outcomes, getting data into a usable state, building in time for proactive work, and bringing in expertise that can drive action.

Want to close the performance gap in your buildings? Next Sense helps building owners move beyond dashboards to real results. We bring your data together in one platform, identify where energy is being wasted, and work with you through regular expert sessions to turn insights into action. Get in touch to see how your building is really performing.