By Trevor Vick, CEO, UMIP
When two steel columns buckled on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters in Manhattan this July, the building safety industry watched a familiar sequence unfold.
Investigators and engineers scrambled to reconstruct what had happened to the 37-story tower, then mid conversion from office space into more than 1,600 apartments. For anyone in economic development or site selection, the story reads less like a construction mishap and more like a warning about the assets communities market, incentivize and redevelop.
Reporting from industry news sources noted that engineers were cautioned against assuming the visible damage marked the full extent of the problem, since major structural elements are interconnected and a failure in one area often signals stress elsewhere. Early accounts pointed toward a missing steel reinforcement plate, a detail that should have appeared in the project’s engineering plans but never reached the columns, according to engineers cited by The Real Deal.
It would be easy to read this as a documentation failure. That framing undersells what happened. The tower did not lose its documentation. It lost records continuity. Every renovation, every code cycle, every material change was tied to whatever system, contractor or individual happened to be tracking it at the time. When that link broke, the connective thread of the asset’s history broke with it.
For site selectors, this is the exact risk that hides inside every adaptive reuse project, every brownfield redevelopment and every shovel-ready site marketed to a prospective employer. The missing layer is not another document repository. It is a persistent identity that connects every record, inspection, permit, renovation, owner, engineer and software platform to the same physical asset over its entire lifecycle.
Why Due Diligence Keeps Hitting the Same Wall
Even communities with disciplined records management run into this failure mode. A document repository can answer what records exist on file. It cannot answer what has happened to a specific physical asset across its operating life, the exact question a corporate real estate team, a state incentive office or a lender wants answered before committing capital to a site.
A recent industry analysis of facility continuity by Jack Rubinger in Continuity Insights found that as veteran facility managers retire or move on, decades of undocumented building knowledge often leave with them, since that knowledge frequently lives in someone’s head rather than in a system. The same analysis cited IFMA projections that more than 45% of facility management professionals worldwide will retire within the next decade, testing how confidently a community can vouch for the buildings it is trying to fill.
That is the same failure described two ways. Whether the loss is a retiring engineer who carried undocumented knowledge out the door, or a repository that cannot say what a structure can and cannot support after decades of alterations, the cause is identical. The record lives with the software, the vendor or the employee, never with the infrastructure or the community trying to market it.
What Site Certification and Emergency Response Have in Common
In a post-failure scenario, structural engineers, investigators and insurers are not looking for a folder of drawings. They need a reliable, continuous chain of custody for every material change made to a structure, traceable back to who made it, when and under what code cycle. A binder handed off at turnover cannot provide it, and neither can a site certification packet built years before a prospect tours the property.
The same need extends well beyond structural engineering. Fire departments, emergency managers, FEMA damage assessors, insurance adjusters, building officials and urban search and rescue teams all depend on the same continuous history of what a building is, what it can support, and what has changed. Economic developers depend on that identical history every time they ask an engineer to validate a site for a manufacturing prospect, a data center or a distribution facility with heavy floor load requirements.
What emergency response, and increasingly site certification, actually requires is closer to a VIN for physical infrastructure: a persistent identifier that every contractor, engineer, permitting office and software platform can reference over decades, regardless of who owns the data or which system created it. Imagine marketing a certified industrial site if every engineering record were stored under a different numbering system every time ownership changed. That would be unacceptable in economic development. Yet it remains normal.
Recent survey findings from ARC Facilities on facility leader confidence are not really measuring documentation quality. They are measuring identity fragmentation. The survey found that many facility leaders describe only partial confidence in accessing critical building information when it matters most, with one respondent noting plainly that their organization lacks a reliable system, and another describing an ongoing struggle to retain critical knowledge. For a site selection professional underwriting a redevelopment incentive, that low confidence should register as deal risk.
The Layer the Industry Never Standardized
Over the past several decades, the built environment has methodically standardized layer after layer of how infrastructure gets built and managed. CAD standardized design. BIM standardized information. GIS standardized location. IFC standardized interoperability. Digital twins standardized representation. AI is now beginning to standardize intelligence.
What none of those layers ever standardized is identity: a persistent, portable reference that follows a piece of infrastructure across every one of those systems and throughout its lifecycle, including every rezoning, incentive agreement and change of ownership a site goes through on its way to becoming a project.
The Pfizer conversion is useful not because documentation failed at a single point, but because continuity failed across an entire history of changes, and continuity ultimately depends on identity. The more productive question for economic developers is not how thoroughly a candidate site gets documented before it goes to market, but why so little of that documentation carries a persistent identity across ownership changes, renovations and software migrations, an identity that would let a prospect, a lender or an insurer trust the site’s history the moment they see it.
The built world has standardized nearly every way information is created, exchanged and analyzed. The next standard will not be another data format. It will be persistent identity, and it will determine which sites communities can credibly certify as ready.
Trevor Vick is the CEO of UMIP, Inc. and the founder of the Global Infrastructure Identity Standard (GIIS). For more information visit www.umipinc.com.