Real estate technology has spent the past decade getting very good at the parts of a building people can see and touch after it opens. There are capable platforms now for tenant experience, building operations, energy management, leasing and asset management, and all of them earn their keep.
What almost none of them touch is the stretch of time when a developer’s cost basis, cash flow and schedule risk are actually decided, which is during the physical build.
Real estate developers carry the ultimate financial risk on a project. They sign the construction loan, they answer to the equity and they absorb the consequences when a building opens late. Yet they remain among the most underserved participants in construction technology, largely because the tools built over the past decade were designed for the general contractor, leaving the developer to consume whatever summary the contractor chooses to produce.
That arrangement was tolerable when capital was cheap. It’s considerably less tolerable now. Deloitte’s 2026 Commercial Real Estate Outlook, built on a survey of more than 850 C-level executives at firms holding at least $250 million in assets under management, found that over half of respondents face a property loan maturity in the coming year and that only 21% expect to be able to pay it off in full. When refinancing is that tight, a schedule that slips two months turns
into a financing event.
The Reality Capture Myth
Walk a large jobsite today and you’ll find it documented more thoroughly than at any point in this industry’s history. Superintendents wear 360-degree cameras on their walks, drones fl y the site weekly and laser scanners record interiors before they’re closed up. Developers fund most of that capture, either directly or through the general contractor’s general conditions, and the archives it produces are enormous.
The difficulty is that documentation and measurement aren’t the same thing. A complete visual record of a fl oor tells a developer what that floor looked like on a given Tuesday and very little beyond it. It doesn’t say how much of the planned work went in, whether the installation rate is speeding up or slowing down, or whether the trades are working in the sequence the schedule assumed. Answering any of that still takes a person who opens the imagery, marks up progress against a plan and reconciles it against the schedule by hand.
In our experience across owner and contractor projects, the great majority of the visual data captured on a jobsite is never used to make a single decision. It sits in shared archives, technically available and practically inert, which is to say the industry has solved capture and left interpretation roughly where it found it.
There’s a second-order problem here that developers should find genuinely uncomfortable. Dodge Construction Network reported in September 2024 that only 11% of field personnel always have access to needed information about what and where to build. The monthly progress report that a developer accepts and acts on starts from that same incomplete picture.
Risk Compounds Quietly
Projects rarely fail in one visible event; they fail through accumulated deviations nobody quantified in time. McKinsey found that the average capital project reached completion 20 months behind schedule and 80% over budget. The mechanics behind a number like that are unglamorous. A trade installing at 750 linear feet per week against a plan that assumed 1,000 is a manageable variance in week two, and by week 10 that same shortfall needs premium labor, resequencing and a formal recovery plan. It reaches the developer as a change order instead of a warning.
Deloitte’s 2026 Engineering and Construction Outlook comes at the same problem from the data side, noting that poor-quality data keeps undermining the reliability of analytics and AI on projects and drags down the return on those investments. More imagery won’t repair a project nobody is measuring.
Evidence-Based Draw Validation
The place a developer feels this gap most sharply is the monthly draw. A request arrives with a schedule of values and a set of percentages, a contractor asserts that an activity is 80% complete, and somebody on the owner’s side must decide whether to believe it. In practice, that means a field walk, a review of photographs, a round of phone calls and a judgment made under time pressure, because the payment cycle doesn’t wait for certainty. On a large project, that verification can run past 20 hours per cycle and still end in an estimate rather than a measurement.
“Looks about 80% complete” and “847 of 1,000 linear feet are installed” are not the same sentence, and the distance between them is worth real money at the moment a draw gets certifi ed. Time-stamped quantities, pulled automatically from captures the project is already paying for and mapped against the schedule of values, change the character of that conversation.
We’ve seen owner teams take draw verification from more than 20 hours to under three, though the more consequential shift is that the answer becomes defensible: a quantity tied to a dated capture is evidence, where a percentage in a spreadsheet is only an assertion.
This works in the contractor’s favor too, which developers sometimes miss. In 2025, construction finance software company Rabbet reported that 91% of general contractors factor an owner’s payment reputation into their bids, and that 88% had declined to bid on at least one project in the previous year because of a slow-pay reputation. An owner who can verify progress quickly and pay against evidence becomes a better counterparty to work for, and that turns up in pricing and in the quality of the bidder pool.
Standardizing the Portfolio
For a developer running several projects at once, the deeper problem is comparability. Every general contractor reports differently: formats vary, definitions of percent complete vary, capture discipline varies and so does the level of candor. A developer with six active projects ends up reading six different languages while trying to determine which building is in trouble, and by the time the pattern is legible the window to fix it cheaply has usually closed.
An objective measurement layer sitting on top of the imagery lets a developer set that standard rather than inherit it, with the same capture cadence, the same quantities, the same schedule alignment and the same definition of complete applied to every job regardless of who is executing the work. The contractor still runs the job, and the developer stops depending on the contractor’s reporting conventions to understand their own portfolio.
The evidence suggests that’s where the returns are. Dodge Construction Network and the National Institute of Building Sciences surveyed nearly 200 United States owners managing at least $5 million in annual construction for a July 2025 report funded by Autodesk, Esri and Trimble. Only 23% were highly engaged in data-centric practices and just 18% reported using digital twins, but among those who were highly data-centric, 86% reported improved cost, schedule, quality, safety and sustainability outcomes against 74% of owners generally. What separates those two groups isn’t how much technology they own; it’s whether they’ve organized the data well enough to act on it.
Putting Intelligence in the Owner’s Seat
This is the shift our partnership with Zero RFI is built around. Zero RFI is an AI-native platform company founded by KP Reddy and backed by General Catalyst, and it operates owner’s representative firms through its Foundation Zero platform. In July, we announced an agreement that integrates our progress tracking software into that service delivery. We convert site captures from 360° cameras, drones and laser scanners into schedule-aligned progress data. An owner’s rep can walk into a monthly meeting carrying quantified, schedule-aligned progress instead of a narrative compiled after the fact.
That combination works because owner representation is where a developer’s judgment actually gets exercised.
Documentation Was Never the Destination
Construction will always be physical, local and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be opaque to the person financing it. The developers who pull ahead over the next few years won’t be the ones with the most cameras on site. They’ll be the ones who turn the imagery they’re already paying for into a quantitative system of progress data, and who use it to certify draws, defend schedules and see risk across a portfolio while it’s still small enough to manage. The capture infrastructure is already installed on most job sites; what’s left is the discipline to measure what it gives us.
