The commercial real estate industry needs a Carfax-style tracking system for buildings, according to Trevor Vick, the CEO of software development and infrastructure identity asset firm UMIP.

Vick cites the buckling of two steel columns on a Manhattan office-to-residential project as an example of where such a database could be indispensable.

“It would be easy to read this as a documentation failure,” Vick writes in a column published by Construction Dive. “That undersells what happened. The tower documentation didn’t fail; instead, it suffered from a lack of continuity.”

He posits a system that would record “the history of the structure that connects every record, inspection, permit, renovation, owner, engineer and software platform to the same physical asset over its entire lifecycle.”

Although designers can find engineering and construction documents for most modern buildings, document repositories can only answer what records exist on file, Vick writes. They do not track a specific physical asset across its operating life.

The Manhattan conversion is a useful exemplar not because documentation failed at a single point, but because the continuity of its documentation and identity likely failed across an entire history of changes, Vick writes.