What do we mean by Building Optimisation?
As a commercial real estate landlord, building optimisation is something that should be near the top of your list if you want to attract and retain the best tenants. But what is it and where do you get started.
Building optimisation is the process of using data to make a building as efficient as possible, maximising the use of resources, whilst minimising environmental impact. You’ll often hear a lot about smart buildings; well building optimisation is the foundation of that.
Optimising a building can have a number of benefits, such as reduced energy costs, enhanced occupant comfort and improved indoor air quality. In addition, these buildings are often more valuable, easier to sell than those that aren’t and have much lower idle time. Optimised buildings can also help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the overall sustainability contribution of the built environment.
What can be optimised?
There are a number of things that can be done to optimise a building.
This includes but is not limited to making HVAC (Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) performance more dynamic through both hardware or software upgrades, installing demand control ventilation, utilisation of sensors to automate lighting, HVAC and other operations, adapting cleaning or maintenance schedules and even alter the layout of rooms and how they are used.
New building optimisation technologies are creating new opportunities for building owners to maximise returns and impact from their real estate.
Here are three key steps to getting started with building optimisation:
- Data collection:
Data is key. Without data, you’re firing arrows into the dark. Collect data about the existing performance of the building, including energy consumption, water usage, temperature and humidity levels, occupancy rates, and so on. Focus on your key business goals and target data collection to support areas of greatest impact first. Keep in mind, rarely does anything ever happen in isolation.
- Data consolidation and analysis:
Siloed data is of little use if you can’t see correlations. Data consolidation has traditionally been one of the industry’s biggest challenges but now more interoperable products have hit the market as well as a host of dashboards. Combine this with data analytics tools to identify opportunities for improvement by looking for patterns and trends that can be addressed through changes in building operations or design. Consider working with a partner that can support or automate this process.
- Implementation:
Make time to assess which changes will impact your business priorities and ensure facilities and management are aligned on how these priorities fit into day-to-day activities. Many of the activities can be automated to save facilities time and ensure changes are not already out of date by the time they are implemented. It’s essential to monitor the results of these changes to ensure that they are having the desired effect on performance.
Predictive building optimisation; the future?
We think so. How does it differ? Well by using AI and autoML we can use past data to anticipate how real time changes in space utilisation may effect a buildings environment or operational needs in the immediate or near future. This means that you can counter any potential rises in CO2 or temperature before they happen, whilst using less power consumption.
This ensures a higher and faster ROI by drastically lowering energy costs and maximises people hours to the most productive tasks to ensure optimal tenant comfort and satisfaction.
With CubeOS, our predictive building optimisation platform we have seen HVAC related energy consumption reduces by up to 50% whilst reducing support requests to building engineers regarding thermal comfort drop by 90%.
Conclusion
Building optimisation is an important process for you, as part of the facilities team or a commercial real estate owner who wants to attract high-quality tenants, maximise your commercial real estate income and meet your ESG goals. These days doing what’s good for the people that interact with your building and the planet, is also good for your bottom line, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
If you need help figuring out how to get started on your building optimisation journey feel free to book a no obligation call with the team and we can help identify where to get started.
