How powerful would it be for property owners to know what their residents are going to do before they actually do it? To predict how they would react to certain amenities, or to intervene just before a resident loses loyalty and switches properties? Leading indicators can give owners a sense of where the economy is headed in the future, paving…
Category: Disclosure/Ratings
Energy Management for Portfolios – Getting Started in 2014
Self-Check It is important for a portfolio or property to conduct a thorough self-assessment of its current performance, goals and requisite level of effort in 2014 before deciding to embark on an energy management program. For firms with energy management procedures already in place, it may be less of a reach to take on…
Understanding CBECS – A key foundation of the EPA’s Portfolio Manager
About the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) CBECS is a national sample survey that collects information on the stock of U.S. commercial buildings, their energy-related building characteristics, and their energy consumption and expenditures. The CBECS was first conducted in 1979; the tenth, and most recent survey, was fielded starting in April 2013 to provide…
Waste – the rising enemy of utility expense control
America is a disposable society According to a Fortune Magazine article in November 2013, American cities are scrambling to deal with the mounting piles of garbage. Alarming statistics support this statement: In 2011, we generated 250 million tons of garbage, nearly double the amount of 1970. The number of landfills over the same period dropped…
Developing a long term portfolio strategy for investing in energy efficiency
Seven (7) events that trigger energy efficiency upgrades and resulting savings There are many discrete financial and regulatory events that may prompt an owner to upgrade a Multifamily building. However, in general, there are a few specific events in a Multifamily building’s Lifecycle when it is typically more cost effective, convenient and efficient to make savings…
San Francisco Energy Audits – Are you ready?
Learning from History Three major U.S. cities – New York, San Francisco, and Boston – have created energy ordinances that pair benchmarking with energy audits and/or building tune-ups (retro-commissioning) every five to 10 years. We anticipate San Francisco to transition its energy ordinance for Commercial buildings to Multifamily properties in 2014 or 2015. As a result, the…
Benchmarking Disclosures – What action is needed now by Multifamily Owners?
Understanding the different ordinances – it can be a jungle out there! There is no National Legislation that requires consistent compliance. Cities and States are driving this issue independently. So the answer is: it depends on where the property is located. Varying from jurisdiction to jurisdiction is the size of the building (in square feet) that…
Another roadblock to Energy Management in Multifamily – The availability of “Whole Building” utility data
Benchmarking the energy performance of a property—that is, measuring it and comparing it to similar properties—requires utility data on energy consumption and load over at least 24 contiguous months . Owners and operators of multifamily properties must have access to this utility data for the whole building in order to benchmark it accurately. However, whole-building energy data is…
Eight Green Credentials you should know about
When you hear the topic of green certification for buildings, LEED is typically one the first things to come to mind. But the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is not the only legitimate option. The City of San Francisco recently began recording sustainability labels of buildings in their official…