It’s 4:30 pm on a Friday and you’re anxiously looking at the calendar wondering what you’re going to do.
You’re the Director of Sustainability for a Fortune 500 company and the annual report is coming due.
In years past, the primary focus of sustainability reporting had been on business operations and the supply chain. In the beginning, it had been a significant challenge to compile the necessary data to report on the emissions from logistics, manufacturing, in-store operations and more.
Painstakingly, you had set up the frameworks and processes necessary to capture this data. Since then, reporting has been in a good spot.
But there’s a new wrinkle this year. Institutional investors are asking for data around the millions of square feet of office space that the company occupies, and the related emissions from the utilities consumed in those.
Office emissions data had previously been estimated using benchmarks for locations and square footage.
But estimates will no longer cut it.
The problem is that the utility data necessary to make accurate calculations is dispersed, siloed, trapped in PDFs, or non-existent.
Now, it’s back to the drawing board, figuring out what data is available, and how to fill gaps.
The flip side
A few weeks ago, we wrote an article on the triple net lease and ESG and how landlords are bridging the gap to get utility data they don’t have direct access to.
The other side of the same coin are large office occupiers in multi-tenant buildings, where utility data is either provided through opaque (and sometimes paper-based) submetering bills or simply charged as a flat rate depending on square footage.
Ironically, while owners and operators are scrambling to advance their own ESG initiatives, they’re often not supporting their tenants who are doing the exact same thing.
In some cases, there’s a good excuse for not providing better transparency for tenants. If submeters are not in place, there may be no reliable way to capture this data and therefore impossible to make it accessible.
But there are an estimated 2 million submeters installed in the United States. For those tenants, there’s no good excuse for not providing them with transparency, access to information and comparative analytics.
Submetering: a missed opportunity
In New York, Local Law 88 will require all buildings over 25,000 square feet to install electrical submeters for every tenant space greater than 5,000 square feet and provide monthly energy statements by 2025.
Many other municipalities are following suit. Historically, energy rules developed in New York City and California tend to spread across the country in the following decade. For example, the Seattle Energy Code requires data to be collected for any space over 2,500 square feet. Even when it’s not required, many landlords submeter specific tenants for business reasons.
Regardless of the motive for submetering, landlords have often taken the path of least resistance. They have met the minimum requirements by installing submeters and issuing statements on a monthly basis. The bills generally come in and get paid without a second thought.
Unfortunately, this approach is a big missed opportunity. Landlords have been adopting tenant engagement apps to make amenities more accessible, but provide very little when it comes to making their energy data more accessible.
Clearly, there’s a massive disconnect.
For a long time, the industry has talked about the fact that tenants make up as much as 70% of a building’s total consumption, and at the same time, how difficult behavior change can be.
There’s now a unique opportunity to provide a valuable service that tenants need. That is, instant and easy access to their utility consumption data, ideally already translated into carbon emissions data for ESG reporting.
Fostering a partnership
Even sophisticated landlords have focused on what they can directly control: monitoring and optimizing the base building equipment. Increasingly sophisticated building management systems have been installed, as well as an analytics layer on top to optimize schedules and set points.
It may seem simple, but what many tenants need is an export button. They need one place they can go to pull out all of their electrical consumption, cost and emission data.
Ideally, this data would be in real time, but it does not have to be for the purposes of sustainability reporting.
What is required is a seamless experience that is automatically populated with new bills when they are generated, easy navigate and compare across historical data, and easy to export both raw data and actual bills.
It’s a low hanging fruit opportunity to provide a premium tenant experience in a competitive market where tenants are only getting more savvy.
In fact, with how important ESG is becoming, it might start being a differentiating factor for leasing decisions.
Enertiv’s Tenant Billing module not only saves time, it helps identify opportunities to increase recovery and, most importantly, has a tenant portal to provide transparency to tenants. Schedule a demo today to see how it works.
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