Every time a building changes hands, gets renovated, or moves from one management team to another, the same costly problem repeats: the incoming party starts from scratch with a different set of data than the party before them.
The real estate and construction industry has spent decades digitizing individual workflows, including design software, asset management platforms, and project management tools. Yet it still hasn’t solved the underlying problem: how information moves between these systems. According to Pierre Saunal, Co-Founder & CEO of SnapTwin, this fragmentation costs the global industry an estimated $2 trillion every year.
“Each step is working with a different set of data, which on some occasions is no data at all,” Saunal says.
The figure, which Saunal describes as an industry estimate, reflects waste generated by rework, miscommunication, duplicated effort, and delayed decision-making across the building lifecycle. The architect who designs a renovation works from one information set, the contractor who builds it from another, the asset manager who operates the result from a third, and the insurer who underwrites it from a fourth. At each handoff, data is lost, recreated, or ignored.
Why Digitalization Didn’t Fix It
Most digitalization efforts in the built environment have focused on new construction. Building information modeling (BIM), a process for creating smart 3D models of buildings, has become standard practice on large projects. But new construction represents only a small fraction of the buildings that need to be managed, retrofitted, and transacted.
According to Saunal, 2.4 billion buildings worldwide will need retrofitting in the coming years, representing 80% of the building stock expected to exist in 2050. Ninety percent of those buildings have no digital data at all. Saunal calls these “dark assets.” Creating that data today is entirely manual: slow, expensive, and inconsistent in quality.
“Trying to make with what we have, that is starting to be a big problem,” Saunal says.
The traditional response has been to commission a measured building survey at the start of each new project phase. This creates a fresh record that serves the immediate need, but it’s rarely structured to carry forward to the next stakeholder. The same building gets re-documented repeatedly across its lifecycle, with each iteration consuming time and budget without contributing to a cumulative information asset.
Investor and Insurer Blind Spots
For real estate investors and insurers, this data fragmentation creates specific risks. Investment decisions depend on accurate assessments of a building’s physical condition, energy performance, and retrofit potential. When the underlying data is fragmented or absent, those assessments rest on assumptions that may not survive contact with the actual asset.
Saunal points to insurance as a sector where the consequences are particularly visible. Assessing a building’s exposure to flood risk requires integrating data from multiple sources, held in separate systems and formatted differently by jurisdiction. “Imagine if for every building, you’re an investor, you’re an insurer, even a contractor, you have very easy access to that data,” Saunal says.
The same logic applies to carbon assessment, an increasingly material factor in both investment underwriting and regulatory compliance. Without reliable data on building materials, systems, and energy consumption, carbon calculations are estimates at best. As disclosure requirements tighten, the gap between what investors need and what building records actually contain will likely become a bigger source of friction in transactions.
Toward a Shared Data Layer
A handful of companies are working on this interoperability problem from different angles. Some are building AI-driven scan-to-BIM pipelines; others are focused on standardizing asset-management data feeds or carbon reporting formats. SnapTwin’s version centers on creating what Saunal calls a “universal shell” for each building: a lightweight geometric model of every room, populated with structured data extracted by AI from point cloud scans and supplemented by manufacturer information, asset manager records, and other sources.
The output is formatted in IFC, an international open standard for building data. Saunal says this format is compatible with virtually every major software platform used across architecture, engineering, construction, and operations. The same data asset can be used by a designer at the beginning of a project and an asset manager at the end, without requiring either party to change their existing software.
“You are not asking me to use a new software to learn a new thing,” Saunal says. “We embed ourselves in your software. You give us a point cloud, we create a file format which is 100% compatible, which we give to you. You don’t depend on us.”
Saunal estimates that roughly 50% of the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations industry now uses point clouds daily, with projections reaching 87.5% by 2030. That adoption curve suggests the raw material for building-level digital twins is becoming widely available. The industry-wide challenge is converting those scans into structured, interoperable data that persists across a building’s lifecycle rather than serving a single project phase.
About the Expert: Pierre Saunal is co-founder and CEO of SnapTwin, a UK-based startup developing lightweight digital twin technology for existing buildings using a scan-to-data approach.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
