Excel as input is the protein-based bottleneck killing CRE data

Tech is rewriting commercial real estate exponentially. Most coverage is news - who raised what, who bought what. This newsletter covers physics. Structural forces. Patterns before they’re obvious. Atoms and bits. Subscribe for updates →

the physics

The brutal truth about Excel as an input tool: it keeps your hands full of work.

Its flexibility, the thing everyone loves, creates room for multiplying endless tables, spreadsheets, pivots, analyses. Following Parkinson’s law: given three days for a job with Excel, you will fill that time.

Another angle - Excel puts way too much unstructured power in one person’s hands. No agreed systems. No frameworks. Just files, shared at most. It becomes an analog-to-digital protein-based transmitter, or worse, digital-to-digital.

Need a rent roll? Easy. Read through lease contracts, fill the spreadsheet. And then, with unwavering satisfaction, look at all the things you could do with that data! Until they’re no longer up to date. What then? You do it again. And again.

the signal

Every single business has one thing in common: flow of information. If there’s no flow, the business must be dead. And if there’s flow, it means there’s variance - vast amounts of data constantly changing.

Real estate is a great example. Some fundamental parameters stay constant - age, location - but those are asset parameters, not the business itself. All the “life” is flowing. Tenants coming in and out. Lease terms adjusting to market conditions. Investors buying and selling.

Half the industry shares building availability using spreadsheets that are updated based on another spreadsheet of lease contracts. Think about that: spreadsheet updating spreadsheet. It’s almost perverse.

When Excel becomes your input tool for raw data, decay is inevitable. The file becomes unreliable. Every real estate company I’ve seen maintains financial data across at least three parallel systems - accounting software, internal spreadsheets, operational tools - with manual reconciliation between them.

One new CFO at a client maintains a detailed Excel register duplicating their CRM data, planning to “copy conclusions to Hubspot” rather than migrate the workflow. The pattern repeats everywhere.

the translation

The role of Excel must be different. It should work as a tool for flexible OUTPUT, not INPUT. Data must flow to the system with minimal human interference.

For CRE executives: Input should always come from raw information as close to the source as possible - lease agreements, invoices, emails with information - and go directly to the system. Not from manually created spreadsheets. When you use Excel as input, you’re not being flexible. You’re creating a protein-based bottleneck that scales exactly as well as the humans maintaining it.

For proptech founders: Make “Export to XLS” your best feedback loop. Every export shows you what your software can’t do yet. Track them. Learn from them. Build those features into the system. Excel should be the escape hatch, not the default.

final thought

The question isn’t whether Excel is good or bad. It’s whether you’re using it as infrastructure or as analysis.

One scales. The other decays.