By: Chief Technology Officer at LightBox, Eric Bollens
Note to Readers: This article is part of an ongoing series by Eric Bollens. Drawing from his work leading LightBox’s data and technology strategy, this series offers a behind-the-scenes look at how LightBox’s products are being architected, connected, and applied to solve real challenges across commercial real estate, environmental due diligence, and risk intelligence, advancing how industry professionals understand property, risk, and opportunity.
Climate-driven hazards such as wildfire, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and extreme heat are increasingly influencing the commercial real estate (CRE) lifecycle, prompting lenders, investors, and environmental professionals to look beyond traditional environmental due diligence. While ASTM E1527 remains foundational for evaluating a property’s history to identify environmental conditions, new datasets are strengthening how that process is applied. Property-level fire incident history, for example, adds important context for assessing whether past fire events may have contributed to environmental conditions that warrant further inquiry. Further, as the risk of climate-related impacts grow, CRE stakeholders are considering how assets will perform under the stress of future hazards and how to respond when disasters occur. These perspectives create a more complete understanding of environmental and resilience risk across the property lifecycle.
The growing frequency of wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires illustrate why a more connected understanding of risk is essential. Wildfires can damage structures, release hazardous residues, and complicate redevelopment and financing, but they also signal how past events, future exposure, and present response are deeply interconnected. Addressing these layers in isolation can leave decision-makers with an incomplete picture. By linking them, CRE stakeholders can better evaluate environmental conditions, plan for long-term resilience, and manage recovery when disasters occur.
At LightBox, we understand this holistic view as a continuum of risk intelligence, and we are investing in a unified ecosystem of data and tools that bring these dimensions together to better inform diligence, resilience, and response across the CRE lifecycle, creating a stronger foundation for understanding collateral, managing operations, and protecting long-term value.
Historical Risk in Environmental Due Diligence (ASTM E1527)
LightBox’s national fire incident dataset gives environmental professionals (EPs) visibility into past property-level fire events. In a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) per ASTM E1527-21, that history matters because it can indicate potential releases (such as asbestos, metals, or organic compounds), altered pathways that could increase vapor intrusion potential, improper ash and debris handling that may rise to a Recognized Environmental Condition (REC) or warrant additional inquiry or sampling. Integrating fire history into ESA research supports clearer professional judgment and documentation aligned to the standard.
While historical fire data is important in the ESA context, it is important to recognize that it does not forecast the likelihood of a future wildfire or quantify prospective building performance, and it does not replace a Property Condition Assessment (PCA), an engineering or loss-control review, or catastrophe modeling used for insurance pricing or coverage.
Nonetheless, for lenders and investors, the historical data still has consequences. A prior fire can affect insurability, introduce liability complexity, and complicate redevelopment, all of which can influence loan terms or investment theses. There is also a significant difference between a short-lived restaurant grease fire and a large-scale chemical explosion and fire. Having these records available during underwriting and acquisition helps calibrate collateral risk and portfolio exposures more precisely.
Future Resilience with Property Resilience Assessment (ASTM E3429)
Where ASTM E1527 anchors the past, the Property Resilience Assessment (PRA, ASTM E3429-24) looks to the future. The PRA framework establishes a structured approach for understanding a property’s capacity to absorb, adapt, and recover from hazards. It complements, rather than replaces, ESAs, PCAs, or insurance risk engineering.
Through the acquisition of UrbanFootprint, LightBox is expanding its ability to deliver forward-looking datasets that model hazards such as wildfire, flood, hurricanes, and extreme heat. Combined with demographic and infrastructure data, these models give CRE stakeholders clearer visibility into how exposures may evolve and how resilience can be evaluated within existing workflows. This advancement moves the conversation beyond static hazard identification toward providing the data and modeling that enable stakeholders to:
- Anticipate how properties may be affected under future conditions
- Evaluate performance under stress or disruption
- Apply that information to guide investment, underwriting, and risk management decisions
A simple wildfire-exposed, mixed-use residential property example illustrates the PRA’s practical logic:
- Hazard picture: Pair local incident history with WUI data to broadly characterize risks. The PRA’s aim is performance, not contamination identification, but history is part of the context here.
- Current use reframing: Risk profile shifts with use (restaurant to mixed-use residential), so occupant safety and life-safety systems may rise in priority.
- Vulnerabilities and measures: Evaluate envelope, vents, windows, defensible space, evacuation plans, and water supply access, then identify non-combustible cladding, ember-resistant vents, fire-resistant landscaping, sprinklers, alarms, drills, and coordination with local fire services.
- Decision-making: PRA documents options and tradeoffs. It does not mandate a single solution or predict event timing. Stakeholders weigh costs, benefits, and regulatory needs.
Resilience is not only about the property itself. Surrounding assets and hazards can amplify risk through contaminants from adjoining parcels during a fire, infrastructure failures that worsen flooding, or debris carried by a hurricane. By combining parcel, land use, and environmental hazard datasets with predictive models in LightBox Live (coming in 2026), stakeholders will soon be able evaluate both site-specific exposures and the broader context, producing a more complete and defensible view of resilience.
Where Transactional Risk Management Fits (and Does Not)
In practice, CRE transactions weave together multiple due diligence threads, such as ESA, PCA, survey and title work, appraisals, insurance placement, along with resilience scopes, such as a PRA. These are complementary, but not interchangeable:
- Phase I ESA (ASTM E1527): Historical records and site reconnaissance to identify potential environmental conditions such as a prior fire leading to a REC. Fire incident data may enhance the documentation side of this assessment.
- PRA (ASTM E3429): Forward-looking resilience profile and a menu of design and operations considerations useful for capital planning, risk governance, and, where relevant, insurance engagement.
- Insurance risk engineering and placement: Carrier-specific measures, deductibles, catastrophe pricing, and portfolio structuring such as isolating outlier assets. The PRA can inform these discussions, but underwriting criteria vary and should be documented separately.
Treating these as discrete workstreams with shared inputs but distinct outputs reduces confusion, improves defensibility, and keeps due diligence timelines on track. Each plays a different role in the continuum: the ESA captures what has happened, the PRA frames what could happen, and insurance and capital programs determine how to prepare and respond.
Real-Time Risk and Disaster Response
Resilience is not only measured in history or forecasts. Resilience is also tested in the present, when owners and agencies need timely and accurate data to guide action after a disaster, and LightBox is there to provide critical property, environmental, and hazard datasets that response and recovery teams rely on to make informed, defensible decisions.
As a recent example, during the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, LightBox delivered property and environmental data to first responders, rebuilding organizations, and public agencies, while also equipping CRE professionals and property owners with insights to assess exposures and plan redevelopment. Further, we collaborated with research institutions to advance policy and science, including co-authoring After a Wildfire: Considerations for Building Environmental Testing and presenting to the State of California’s Smoke Claims and Remediation Task Force.
This extends on prior disaster response work, such as following Hurricane Milton in Florida, where LightBox used parcel and hazard data to map impacted commercial properties, providing lenders, investors, and property managers with actionable post-event analysis. Our environmental datasets have also been deployed following floods and tornado outbreaks to identify suspect contaminants and inform testing strategies, ensuring that rebuilding is grounded in sound environmental practice and financial prudence.
To enable our support for major disaster response, LightBox deploys teams to ensure the most current datasets, including parcels, building footprints, environmental hazards, and other critical information, are delivered in real time to response agencies and recovery teams. These services enable rapid operational decision-making in the field and give lenders and investors the clarity needed to manage financial triage for affected assets.
This present-tense layer does not replace ESA or PRA, but it closes the loop: the past informs what to investigate, the future frames how to strengthen and manage, and the present guides what to do when the unexpected happens.
Putting the Continuum to Work
Bringing the three layers together creates practical advantages for CRE stakeholders:
- Cleaner scoping, fewer surprises. Historical fire records integrated with ESA tasks streamline REC determinations and Phase II decisions while alerting underwriters to potential redevelopment complexities.
- Resilience as capital planning, not guesswork. PRA’s structured assessment turns “What if?” into a prioritized roadmap of property and operational measures, providing actionable insight for decision-makers.
- Insurance conversations with evidence. While carrier criteria differ, clear documentation of building features, maintenance, and site context supports more accurate risk evaluation. PRA outputs and ESA records can strengthen these files.
- Faster recovery, stronger compliance. During and after events, current parcel and environmental data accelerate safe access, testing priorities, and redevelopment plans, reducing downtime and aligning with public-sector requirements.
Risk is not static. A property’s past, captured in historical records, helps refine environmental due diligence and underwriting. Its future, assessed through a PRA lens, guides capital planning and operational hardening. And its present, supported by real-time data, determines how owners, agencies, and financiers respond when hazards materialize. By connecting these dimensions, LightBox is committed to ensuring that every stage of the CRE lifecycle is supported with the trusted intelligence needed to understand risk, manage resilience and respond to disaster.
