BETHESDA, MD—Last year, Courtney Schettino, the assistant property manager of MRP Realty's 700,000-square foot Bethesda Crossing had a problem.
To bill the property's 84 tenants for their utility use, a seemingly simple task, she was overseeing a process that consisted of 8 hours of engineering, 8 hours of accounting, and 8 hours of administrative work. The data had to be collected from 30 separate tenant meters and from start to finish, this chore took about four days to complete.
Frustrated with the cumbersome process, the company tapped locally-based Aquicore to put in place a real-time energy management system that would automate the tenant billing process.
The upshot? Schettino has much more free time in her schedule now: reports are automatically populated, with the staff spending about 30 minutes to double-check the data and send out the invoices.
Welcome to the smart building revolution -- a movement that not only promotes sustainable development and operations but also delivers some very nice productivity gains as well.
Such stories will become more and more common as these technologies grow. One newly-released report from Technavio estimates the global smart building market will increase at a CAGR of almost 12% from 2015-2019 in a new report. Major vendors in the space include Cisco Systems, Control4 Corp., Honeywell Scanning and Mobility, Schneider Electric SE, United Technologies Corp., Leviton, Emerson Electric and Siemens Building Technologies.
But back to MRP and the assistance it received from Aquicore. While it is a start up that focuses on one piece of the smart building market it is more likely to be a building owner's first introduction to this technology, as opposed to the sweeping solutions offered by the aforementioned conglomerates, precisely because of the immediate productivity savings.
GlobeSt.com caught up with Aquicore CEO Logan Soya to get further insight into how MRP deployed the system.
GlobeSt.com: You took a 24-hour process and condensed it to 30 minutes. Can you reverse engineer that for me?
Soya: MRP installed wireless meters, creating an automated data collection system, which transmits the data directly to MRP's billing software.
GlobeSt.com: Besides the productivity savings, what else does a system like this deliver for its tenants?
Soya: With an automated data collection system…tenants feel that they can rely on the information because they always receive their invoices on time, and they know the process has been automated and the bills are correct.
Also, landlords can also offer more transparency to their tenants by giving them day-by-day or minute-by-minute report. Tenants really appreciate this because they regain control of one of their costs.
GlobeSt.com: Are building owners in general aware of these kinds of advancements? Or is smart building technology still viewed as something far off.
Soya: Building owners know about changing light bulbs or installing more energy efficient HVAC systems or windows. While metering has been around for a while, the wireless piece, particularly with a tenant billing capability is relatively new. Our company has been in this space for 2 years, and we are seeing other entrants to the market.
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
