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, and commercial property insurers should have watched just as closely.
Reporting noted that engineers were cautioned against assuming the visible damage marked the full extent of the problem at the 37-story tower, then mid-conversion into more than 1,600 apartments. Structural elements are connected, 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 was never installed, according to engineers cited by The Real Deal.
For a carrier underwriting that asset, or an adjuster assigned to the claim, it would be easy to call this a documentation failure. That framing undersells the problem. The tower did not lose its documentation. It lost records continuity. Every renovation, code cycle, and material change was tied to whatever system or individual happened to be tracking it at the time. When those links broke, so did the file's ability to describe the true risk on the books.
The missing layer is not another document repository. It is a persistent identity connecting every record, inspection, permit, renovation, owner, engineer, and platform to the same physical asset across its lifecycle and every policy period it will ever carry.
Documentation Answers the Wrong Question
Even carriers with disciplined underwriting files run into this. A document repository answers what records exist. It cannot answer what actually happened to a specific asset across its operating life, the question a claims examiner is really asking.
A recent industry analysis of facility continuity found that as veteran facility managers retire, decades of undocumented building knowledge often leave with them, since it lives in someone's head rather than in a system. The analysis cited IFMA projections that more than 45% of facility management professionals worldwide will retire within a decade, removing much of the institutional memory insurers have quietly relied on when pricing risk.
That is the same failure described two ways: a retiring manager who carried undocumented knowledge out the door, or a file that cannot say what a structure can support after decades of alterations. The cause is identical. The record lives with the software, the vendor, or the employee, never with the infrastructure itself.
What Claims and Underwriting Actually Require
In a post-failure scenario, structural engineers, investigators, and claims teams are not simply looking for a folder of drawings. They need a reliable, continuous chain of custody for every material change, traceable to who made it, when, and under what code cycle. A binder handed off at turnover cannot provide what's needed.
The same need extends well beyond a single claim. Fire departments, FEMA, adjusters, building officials, and search and rescue teams all depend on the same continuous history of what a building is, what it can support, and what has changed. So does every actuary modeling portfolio exposure, and every reinsurer pricing a treaty against it.
What claims and underwriting actually require is closer to a VIN for physical infrastructure, a persistent identifier every contractor, engineer, permitting office, carrier, and platform can reference over decades, regardless of who owns the data or which system created it. Imagine underwriting an aircraft fleet if every maintenance record moved to a new numbering system each time ownership changed. That is unacceptable in aviation. It remains normal for buildings.
A Survey That Is Measuring Something Deeper
Viewed this way, recent survey findings from ARC Facilities on facility leader confidence are not really measuring documentation quality. They are measuring identity fragmentation, the same fragmentation showing up as inconsistent exposure data across a book of business. The survey found many facility leaders describe only partial confidence in accessing critical building information when it matters most, one noting their organization lacks a reliable system.
Low confidence in complete records is what a carrier's risk engineers should expect in an industry where every renovation, ownership change, and software migration creates another chance for the thread between an asset and its history to snap, often just before a claim tests it.
The Layer the Industry Never Standardized
Over recent decades, the built environment has 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.
None of those layers standardized identity, a persistent, portable reference that follows infrastructure across every system, every underwriting cycle, and every claim, throughout its lifecycle. Each platform generation has improved how information about an asset is captured, but none has solved for what happens once the platform, vendor, or risk manager who understood it moves on.
A digital twin cannot remain continuous if the identity of the asset it represents is not continuous. Neither can a book of business.
Interoperability tells systems how to exchange information. Identity tells systems what they are exchanging information about. The industry has spent 50 years perfecting the first problem while leaving the second unaddressed, and insurers have been pricing risk on top of that gap.
A Different Question for Risk and Insurance Leaders
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 depends on identity. That is a claims story and an underwriting story at once.
The more productive question for the insurance and risk industry isn't how thoroughly infrastructure gets documented. It's why so little of it carries a persistent identity across ownership changes, renovations, and software migrations, including changes in carrier, broker, and policy. Every industry exchanges data about buildings without a shared way to identify what it describes.
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 the carriers who adopt it first will be the ones who can actually price the risk they are holding.
