This started with a question nobody could answer.
We spent a lot of time talking to management groups about their mechanical systems. Two things came up in nearly every conversation.
The first: they didn’t really know what was in their buildings. Not precisely. Not portfolio-wide. There was an equipment list somewhere, and a PCA from the last transaction, and a chief engineer with an excellent memory — but nothing you’d want to build a budget on.
The second was more interesting. Their head engineers were excellent. Genuinely good at diagnosis, at keeping old equipment running, at getting a property through a heat wave on a compressor that had no business still working. But when management asked what the next five years looked like, that expertise didn’t translate. It wasn’t a skill gap. Nobody had ever asked these people to convert a corroded heat exchanger into a line item in fiscal 2029, and no tool existed to help them do it.
So the knowledge stayed in the mechanical room, the budget got built without it, and every year or two a building handed somebody a very expensive surprise.
We started with hotels because hospitality is the hardest version of the problem — the most mechanical equipment per square foot, the least tolerance for downtime, and a failure cost you can calculate to the dollar. If the model holds up in a full-service hotel with a kitchen, a laundry, a pool, and three hundred guest room units, it holds up most places.
Capset is the translation layer. Your engineers assess what’s in front of them — the thing they’re already good at. Capset turns it into remaining useful life, replacement cost, risk, and a multi-year outlook — the thing nobody had time to build.
We’re not trying to replace your engineers’ judgment. We’re trying to get it in front of the people writing the checks, early enough to matter.