How the behavioral score is built.
The benchmark turns what you already know about a building into a behavioral profile — no site visit, and every point traces to something the building observably does.
Behavior, not feeling.
Every point in the score traces back to something the building observably does — not how anyone feels about it. We ask concrete, testable questions: does a credentialed resident get in on every attempt, at every door, at eleven at night? Does a maintenance request get acknowledged? Does the building warn residents before a planned outage, not after? Each one is a behavioral signal — an answer about the building’s conduct that an observer could stand in the lobby and check.
A door that opens nine times out of ten is not ninety-percent reliable; it is unpredictable, and the standard fails it. This is the opposite of a satisfaction survey. A survey asks whether a resident is happy; a signal asks whether the building did what it promised — because a resident can be content in a building that is quietly failing them, and unhappy in one that works but feels cold. And because a signal is an observable fact rather than a feeling, more than one person can answer it — owner, operator, on-site staff, resident — so the answers corroborate one another or surface a disagreement worth seeing.
The behavioral grid.
The questions aren’t arbitrary. They cover six domains — the everyday situations of living in a building: entering (Access), receiving parcels (Deliveries), using shared rooms (Spaces), getting help when something breaks (Support), moving in and out and handling documents (Lifecycle), and living inside the building’s own systems (Environment). Each domain is read through six qualities — does it work (Reliability), do I understand it (Clarity), can I act on it (Control), do the parts agree (Harmony), is it considered (Grace), does it anticipate and protect (Care).
Where each domain meets each quality there is one testable expectation — a fixed map of what good behavior looks like. The map is the same for every building; what changes is which parts apply. A building with no shared amenities simply has no Spaces expectations, and those squares are set aside, not counted against it. The qualities also build on one another: a building can’t be clear if it isn’t first reliable.
Access × ReliabilityEntry on every attempt
What the colors mean.
Each square gets a color, and the color is the point. Green clears the ceiling — the resident meets the moment as quiet and considered, as if the building had anticipated it. Yellow clears the floor but not the ceiling: the minimum works, but without consistency or depth — the zone where the squeaky hinge and the gas leak draw the same templated reply, and the building reads as indifferent. Red fails the floor — the behavior is broken enough that residents have started building their own workarounds. Grey means the square doesn’t apply to your building, and grey never counts against you.
The colors roll up. A domain’s standing comes from its squares, and the overall score is an even average across every square that applies to your building — no area hidden, none weighted louder than another. So a single number like 62 isn’t a verdict you take on faith: open it, and it resolves into exactly which squares are red. That is where you start.
Honest about what it knows.
Not every answer carries the same weight, and that’s deliberate. You and your operations staff see the building’s full operating reality every day; a resident sees one home’s experience. So an owner’s or operator’s observation informs the profile more heavily, and a resident’s more lightly — not because any view is dismissed, but because they see different amounts of the picture. A single frustrated resident’s one-off complaint can’t swing the score the way daily operational knowledge does. When several people answer the same signal and agree, that square firms up; when they disagree, the disagreement stays visible rather than blended away.
And a score built on five answers is not the same animal as one built on fifty — the profile never pretends otherwise. As more signals are answered and corroborated, it moves through four named stages of confidence. Answering more doesn’t push the number up; it stays the honest current truth. What rises is how hard the number is to dismiss — a 62 at Established confidence is a real 62, the kind you can stand behind in front of a board, a lender, or a room of residents.
Cost of inaction, not a vanity number.
A score that says “be more considerate” is useless. So every gap is framed in terms you already recognize — what leaving it broken costs: staff fielding preventable calls, residents leaving early, and the daily friction of the workarounds people invent when the building won’t cooperate. The same gap shown in red is carrying its full cost; a yellow gap carries a fraction of it. This is the cost of inaction, not the cost of the fix.
It is also why the score sorts your gaps by impact for the effort to close them, not by how loud they are: a cheap, high-frequency fix in Clarity can outrank a harder, expensive one in Access. You leave knowing not just that a gap exists, but roughly what it is costing you year on year in turnover and overhead — the language a budget conversation actually runs in.
What stays fixed, and what measures.
Two things are kept deliberately separate, and knowing which is which is what keeps this from being a black box. One defines the behavior; the other measures the outcome. The expectations are stable and public; the scoring is transparent and can be refined without anyone rewriting the standard underneath you — so a building’s promise doesn’t shift every quarter because the measurement got sharper.
What a well-behaved building should do. Published, testable, durable for decades. It doesn’t move when the scoring improves.
How your building measures against the standard. Transparent and maintainable, refined without rewriting a word of ADAG.
A profile, not a report.
What you hold at the end isn’t a checklist or a document to print — it’s a behavioral profile: the score, a breakdown by domain, a read across the six qualities, and your biggest gaps ranked by impact for the effort to close them. It’s timestamped and it stays live, so as you answer more, the picture sharpens and the priorities re-sort themselves.
The profile is free, and it stands on its own — it names your gaps, shows what residents experience, points at the likely cause, and shows the first move up, without costing anything. A deeper reading that sequences those gaps into a single plan is there if you want it, but it’s a layer on top, never a paywall in front.