Every building has things that do not appear in a property manual. There is the reason a particular piece of equipment was replaced instead of repaired. There is the tenant who needs advance notice before a contractor enters the suite. There is the recurring leak that only appears after a certain kind of storm. There is a valve that is difficult to reach, a vendor who knows an older building system better than anyone else, or a past project that solved a problem that no one wants to see return.

Usually, someone on the property team knows these things. The problem comes when that person leaves.

Institutional memory is the collection of knowledge a property team builds over time through experience. Some of it can be documented easily, such as equipment records, service contracts, project files and warranties. Some of it is harder to capture because it exists mostly in people’s heads. It is the knowledge of why a decision was made, what has already been tried, which problems tend to come back and what seems to work best in a particular building.

That knowledge has value. Research on knowledge loss caused by employee turnover has found that organizations can lose knowledge at both the individual and organizational level when experienced employees leave. A 2023 systematic review examined 91 empirical studies on knowledge loss and found that turnover can have a broad range of effects on organizations and individual work units.

For property teams, the impact can be very specific. A new property manager may inherit a building with years of decisions behind it but very little explanation for those decisions. A work order might show that a repair was completed, but not that the same repair had already failed twice. A project file might contain the final drawings but not the reason the team rejected another approach. A tenant file might contain contact information but not the history behind a sensitive relationship.

This can lead to wasted time, duplicated work and unnecessary expense. It can also create frustration for the person taking over the property. They are not simply learning a new job. They are trying to reconstruct years of decisions while keeping the building running.

Building documentation has been a problem for much longer than the current conversation around employee turnover. In a NIST report on building information handover, researchers noted that owners and operations teams have historically spent significant time looking for, validating and recreating facility information. The report estimated that operations and maintenance personnel spent $4.8 billion in 2002 verifying that documentation accurately represented existing conditions, with another $613 million spent transferring that information into a useful format.

Documentation alone, however, is not enough.

A property team can have thousands of files and still lack the information it actually needs. The goal should not be to document everything simply for the sake of having more documents. It is to capture the information that someone else will need when the person who knows it is no longer there.

One place to start is with the “why.”

When a major decision is made, record the reason behind it. If a piece of equipment is replaced, note why replacement was chosen over continued repair. If a vendor is changed, document what prompted the change. If a tenant accommodation is unusual, explain the circumstances. If a recurring problem has a known workaround, record it. A future property manager may not need every detail of the conversation, but they will benefit from knowing what happened and why.

The same approach can be used for building systems. Equipment records should include more than model numbers and service dates. If there is a known quirk with a system, document it. If a piece of equipment requires a particular startup sequence, include that information. If a contractor has specialized knowledge of an older system, make sure that knowledge is not limited to one person’s phone contacts.

Recurring problems deserve special attention. A work-order history can show that a problem occurred, but a property team should also be able to see the pattern. If a particular area floods during heavy rain, for example, that information should not disappear every time a work order is closed. If a tenant has repeatedly experienced the same issue, the history should help the next person understand what has already been attempted.

Tenant relationships are another area where institutional memory matters. A new manager can review a lease and understand the formal terms of a tenant’s relationship with the property. That does not necessarily tell them how the relationship works day to day. There may be established communication preferences, recurring events, access arrangements or past issues that affect how a request should be handled.

This is where a property team’s handoff process becomes important. When someone is leaving a property, the handoff should not consist only of turning over a laptop, keys and a folder of documents. The outgoing manager should walk through the building with the incoming manager and explain the things that are difficult to find in a file.

What should they know about the building? Which tenants require extra attention? What problems have been recurring? Which contractors know the property well? What projects are unfinished? Which equipment has a history? What decisions were made before the current team arrived, and why?

It can also help to have the outgoing employee explain the building while physically walking through it. A mechanical room, roof, loading dock or vacant suite may prompt information that would never appear on a written checklist. Recording those conversations or creating simple notes afterward can preserve some of that context.

The process should not begin when someone gives notice, either. By that point, some knowledge may already be gone. Cross-training and shared responsibility can help prevent one person from becoming the only source of information about a building system, tenant relationship or recurring problem.

The research on knowledge loss points to the same general issue: organizations are better positioned to manage turnover when knowledge is retained in the organization rather than remaining solely with individual employees. One recent study found that organizational structures that retain task knowledge can reduce some of the disruption associated with employee turnover.

For property teams, that does not require creating another complicated system. It can be as simple as making documentation part of the normal workflow. When a project closes, record what changed and why. When a recurring issue is resolved, note what worked. When a major tenant relationship changes, update the relevant information. When an experienced engineer or manager knows something that the rest of the team does not, find a way to share it.

The goal is not to replace experience with paperwork. It is to make sure experience leaves something behind.

Buildings often outlast the people who operate them. The equipment stays. The tenants change. Projects come and go. Property managers move to new assignments, engineers retire and vendors change. Without a deliberate effort to preserve institutional memory, every personnel change can force a team to rediscover information that someone already learned years ago.

The best property teams do not just maintain the physical building. They maintain the knowledge that helps the building operate well. That means documenting the decisions, lessons and quirks that might otherwise walk out the door with the next person who leaves.

To stay up to date on news and resources such as this and other topics of importance to the real estate industry, subscribe to the free CRE Insight Journal Newsletter using this link.