Commercial Sustainability Services for Smarter Buildings

Commercial property development and building management has always required you to sift through piles of paperwork. You have to stay on top of current zoning and land use laws, environmental and corporate governance regulations, evolving building codes, and permitting processes. As a building manager, you’ve probably earned the equivalent of four master’s degrees in your career. 

With ever-changing environmental regulations and tenant demand for sustainable buildings, you need commercial sustainability services to keep up. Or do you? Maybe you’re just missing the right technology. A consultant might be able to help you with your initial audit, but they can’t always help you keep your commitment to sustainability goals. 

What Commercial Sustainability Services Include Today

The corporate focus on sustainability in commercial buildings started with good intentions, but it’s become one of those buzzwords that gets lobbed around like “circle back,” or “synergy.” So what is commercial sustainability? 

Commercial sustainability services refers to any advisory or operational assessment that helps you integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles into your business. As a property manager, you might hire a consultant to assess your building and make suggestions to reduce your carbon footprint or make renovations to comply with changing environmental regulations. 

The consultant model works, but only for the initial assessment. After they leave, you need to implement their recommendations and track your progress. You could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for new studies every year, or you could use technology for continuous data monitoring. 

Employing the bots is more cost-effective than hiring multiple consultants, and you get real-time data all year to track your progress. Plus, you’re keeping AI busy so it can’t morph into the Terminator. 

Core Sustainability Services for Commercial Buildings

Although the person supplying plants for your lobby is making your building greener, they are not offering these crucial sustainability services: 

• Energy Monitoring and Efficiency Optimization: Involves monitoring how each system in your building uses energy to identify waste and lower your overall usage. 

• Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Monitoring for Health and Compliance: Involves assessing your air for harmful gases, molds, and particulates, and making recommendations to improve it. 

• Water Conservation, Leak Detection, and Usage Tracking: Involves evaluating how you use water, looking for leaks, and making suggestions to lower your water use. 

• ESG and Sustainability Data Across Portfolios: Involves tracking and analyzing data on energy, water, waste, and air quality for investor reports, ESG compliance, and others. 

Why Traditional Audits and One-Time Assessments Fall Short

You know you need periodic audits to comply with regulations, so you’re likely hiring someone to come out annually or once every five years, for example. This audit method is fine, but it will probably fall short in helping you meet or exceed your sustainability goals. 

Self-Reported Data

Traditional audits often rely on self-reported historical data. Unless you’re working with an on-site auditor who collects and analyzes the data, they have to take you at your word. These reports also provide a picture of your building at one moment in time. You don’t know if your changes are working until your next audit cycle. 

Limited and Fragmented Data

Without continuous monitoring systems, your ESG data is scattered across your company. Your accounting team has all the bills with utility usage numbers. Your property manager has all the monitoring and maintenance reports for HVAC, plumbing, and other systems. 

If you’re using different systems to measure energy, water, and IAQ, you’re not working with standardized numbers, which makes it hard to compare data for a full picture of your ESQ commitments. 

Verification Challenges

Even if the design and construction team followed sustainable design principles, they don’t track a building’s performance once the job is done. Unless you’re monitoring and logging your own data, you have to rely on outside audits to verify your building’s performance. 

When you’re using outside consultants to audit your performance, they’re probably using different tools and standards to collect and report data. So you don’t really know how you’re performing over time, because you can’t compare the reports. 

How Real-Time IoT Data Enables Continuous Improvement

IoT solutions for commercial sustainability continuously collect and report building data. Setting up sensors to monitor energy usage, water usage, leaks, and IAQ gives you instant insights you can apply immediately. 

For example, if you notice that IAQ gets bad early in the morning as people walk in and out of the building, you can improve ventilation at that time. 

Real-Time Alerts

IoT solutions also send alerts when they think something needs your attention. An IAQ sensor lets you monitor trends in HVAC performance so you can see an anomaly and make any repairs before they get worse. 

Immediate Changes

Reports and dashboards are one of the benefits of energy monitoring software that appeal to your financial team. Your property managers and maintenance team see translate these charts and reports into operational changes that save you money (and help you meet your sustainability goals). 

For example, if your IoT system detects multiple leaks in one area of your building, you can replace the plumbing and schedule more frequent inspections. 

Reducing Risk, Cost, and Emissions With Data-Driven Sustainability

Commercial sustainability services help you do your part to curb climate change, but traditional audits are often inefficient. When you’re only monitoring building performance once a year or less, you are making reactive decisions and managing problems that might have spiraled out of control. 

IoT solutions are always collecting and transmitting data. You can monitor your building’s performance on your phone in the middle of the night if you want.  Tracking data over time helps you repair building issues immediately to prevent downtime and damage. 

Dashboards and other reporting tools are also handy for ESG and regulatory compliance. Instead of sifting through piles of old bills to draft your compliance report, you can print your data and attach it. 

Over time, your building becomes more efficient, and you see your operational costs go down. You also have hard data to prove that you meet your sustainability goals, which helps you prove your property’s value. 

Attune’s IoT solutions let you monitor mechanical, electrical, environmental, and plumbing data in one place. You can optimize your operations to be more efficient in real time instead of waiting for your usual audit. Contact us to learn more.