Under the Surface: The Future of Real Estate Due Diligence — A Case Study
Real estate due diligence demands meticulous attention to detail. Each deal involves volumes of critical files, containing information that could transform the entire business decision. Yet in today’s fast-paced market, these crucial details can be easily overlooked.
We witnessed this firsthand with a client’s commercial real estate acquisition. During standard due diligence, buried within hundreds of pages was a seemingly minor detail — an underground diesel tank, marked only as a small rectangle on a 1970s floorplan. This detail appeared nowhere else: not in the condition report, environmental assessment, or any recent files. The discovery took their team three weeks and thousands in consultant fees to uncover. When we later processed these same records through our platform, it took just 10 minutes to identify the tank and locate the precise reference. For our client, this finding completely changed their approach — requiring new ROI calculations, updated risk assessments, and a completely new environmental compliance strategy.
This experience highlighted a common challenge in commercial real estate. While technology has transformed many aspects of the industry, the core process of analyzing asset information remains surprisingly outdated. Teams still spend countless hours manually reviewing files, knowing they might miss critical details that could impact their decisions.
That moment revealed the scale of opportunity before us. If a single overlooked detail could so significantly impact one transaction, consider the implications across the entire sector. With millions of decisions being made based on asset records every day, we recognized how we could transform this process globally. The challenge our client faced wasn’t unique — we saw this same problem throughout the industry.
While building Brixely, we spent hundreds of hours speaking with operators, understanding data nuances and using their feedback to detect risks early — issues that would otherwise take weeks to uncover in hundreds of pages. This transformation isn’t just about finding specific information; it’s about matching the expertise of industry experts — identifying missing paperwork, cross-referencing permits, and finding potential issues before they become problems. To do this in a way that scales across the industry is a challenge we’re tackling head-on, building a purpose-built system that gets smarter with every insight it unravels.
The current process remains fragmented — crucial records scattered across email attachments, off-the-cuff due diligence checklists, and siloed data rooms. Whether it’s for investment, lending, leasing, management, or operations, firms are analyzing extensive paperwork under time pressure to make critical business decisions. We envisioned a more intelligent approach: a system that could analyze properties with exceptional thoroughness, but at a fraction of the time.
We’re still in the early chapters of this story. Every week we discover new ways to make the process smarter, more thorough, more intuitive. What keeps us going is hearing from teams who’ve found their own “underground tank” moments — critical details that could have been missed but weren’t. Because in real estate, just like in detective work, it’s not just about finding information — it’s about finding the right information before it’s too late.
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p.s. to see how brixely could help your commercial real estate firm uncover what matters, book a quick demo here with us.
