All building analytics is not equal when it comes to asset appreciation

This month I marked ten years of working alongside large property owners to help them reduce their outgoings, particularly maintenance and energy costs while improving productivity and longevity of plant and equipment.

For the past five years, I’ve been doing it with software. Prior to CIM, I worked in property consulting and then the electricity metering industry, where I witnessed what I can only describe as a “crazy approach” of adding capital costs and hardware to achieve OPEX reductions. With five years in each camp, I have zero doubt that the software approach is smarter, easier to install and achieves faster benefits, with no interruption to tenants or operations of the building

Digital transformation has taken some property groups longer to adopt than others, but building analytics has snowballed in popularity in the last two years. These days, most retail and commercial property owners recognise that digitising their buildings to take advantage of existing building data—rather than guesswork, BMS providers and other third-party opinions—provides better results across every element of property management.

However, all building analytics is not equal. Anyone wanting to maximise their asset appreciation should take a closer look at how smart, transparent and independent their data analytics solution is.

CIM’s building analytics technology is focused on optimising the plant and equipment within large buildings. While portfolio owners and managers care about this critical operational area, the technical element has often hindered their ability to understand how to control costs and deliver the best outcomes. Thankfully, intuitive building analytics solutions can now deliver these high-value insights and outcomes.

Realistically, a portfolio manager doesn’t want to spend more than 30 minutes a month trying to understand how their plant and equipment systems are performing within their portfolio and across individual sites. Any building analytics solution should be able to immediately prove good and bad performance, highlight the root cause of any problems, show what’s been fixed and identify opportunities to add value. The solution should also encourage team collaboration based on concrete, independent facts. Importantly, building analytics must be supported by real, human people with technical engineering expertise, so that issues can be identified and resolved seamlessly without requiring engineering experts on site.

Some building analytics platforms are still vendor-specific rather than independent, which often leads to results that drive up consulting hours or equipment spend. Other legacy solutions require manual data uploads to identify issues and negotiate resolutions as they are unable to continuously stream, monitor and analyse live data. Any building analytics solution that is manual and disconnected usually ends up being expensive relative to the outcome, rather like the electricity metering situation I described above, while tying up maintenance groups, engineers and contractors in messy and time-consuming processes.

The team at CIM has produced a new Smart Guide for property owners and managers How to SAVE MONEY and MAKE money with building analytics which we hope will help you understand more about how you can use building analytics to improve your portfolio performance.

If your building analytics solution isn’t seamlessly identifying and resolving issues, if it isn’t backed by serious technical engineering support, and if it isn’t independent, then chances are you are paying more than you should without adding maximum value to your buildings.

The good news is if you choose wisely and your team buys into the opportunity, you’ll quickly see which of your properties are being optimised at the lowest cost base, without sacrificing customer experience. You’ll understand the performance, potential risks and opportunities within every site’s HVAC system, and this is key to a disciplined and strategic approach to asset management.

If you’d like to learn more about CIM’s unique approach to building analytics and how it can add value to your property portfolio, please get in touch with us.