Wins Above Replacement

September 9, 2026 by Donald Davidoff

Back in the early ‘00s, LRO was one of the first examples of the use of predictive analytics to improve operating performance. At the same time, the seminal book, Moneyball, came out and the industry quickly jumped on the obvious comparisons between the two, often referring to Pricing and Revenue Management as “the Moneyball of multifamily.” 

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how AI and BI are changing the way operators and asset managers run their business with a particular eye on the best way to use the limited technical and data science resources most multifamily housing companies have. And in a spirit of “everything that was old is new again,” I’ve starting using another baseball metric as a metaphor: Wins Above Replacement or “WAR.” 

If you’re a baseball fan, you already know what WAR is; and if you’re not, you’re probably a bit tired of all the sports metaphors used in business…but bear with me a moment. WAR is generally thought of as the best single metric to compare players against each other, even across different playing eras. It combines all facets of playing and boils those elements down to how many wins a player contributes to the team compared to a basic replacement. 

While we don’t share the individual stats-rich environment of baseball (this is a metaphor not a direct measure), we can think about the activities of our people in terms of where they are truly adding incremental value to performance (what finance people like to call “alpha”) versus activities that may be (or feel) necessary but don’t contribute to any incremental performance. 

And as executives are under increased pressure to make decisions about analytics and AI, I believe it’s critical think about how we approach where we commit our precious (and limited) resources and where we don’t.  

That’s where WAR comes in. Take the latest rage—DIY AI and BI. Anyone building their own bespoke data platform, whether a data warehouse, data lake or “data lakehouse,” needs to solve many problems already solved. They’ll need to define rent, occupancy, work orders, surveys, marketing metrics, etc. All of the plumbing or what we at REBA call The Foundation. 

Where’s the WAR in that? Will your Data Scientists define those so differently (and better) that you’ll beat your competition? Do you even need anything so highly customized because it would beat the competition? I’m pretty confident the answer to those is “No.” In fact, there’s a risk of negative WAR if they make a mistake and do something suboptimal compared to solutions that have been time-tested. Even taking on the technical debt of owning any changes that systems of record introduce could be negative WAR. 

If there’s not WAR, then why put effort there? That’s just cost. 

So where can WAR be found? Wherever the analyst or data scientist can bring useful insights into your company’s strategy and your company’s performance. This can come from building AI agents or dashboards reports that tap into both the foundational data from PMSs/other systems of record and other more proprietary data that you possess. It can come from insights they generate analyzing your various business operations with all the time released by not having to manage the plumbing. It can come from creating alerts for your operators and asset managers that allow them to make better decisions, faster. 

In short, WAR comes from anything you enable and empower your people to do or create that is built on top of the data, not from simply organizing and normalizing the data. 

And that’s the basis for the “Buy the Foundation. Build Your Advantage.^SM” strategy. Find a partner with an analytics platform that gives you the foundation, and you’ll equip your analysts and data scientists to deliver real WAR!