Today it’s not enough to know how efficient a building should be, based on the way it was designed and constructed – least of all because knowing how a building performs in real time is within reach.
Property emits 40 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions, of which emissions from operation are a major part, and this is driving landlords towards ambitious targets across the lifecycle of their real estate assets, while corporate tenants’ energy-efficiency demands are growing bolder and more complex.
Naturally, this is leading to the acknowledgement that landlords and tenants need to collaborate to improve upon how buildings perform daily, a relationship that can be supported by systems that collect real-time data on measurable usages such as energy, water consumption, air quality and waste management.
Thus, with more owners driving towards net zero, and with workers returning to the workplace, now is the time for property managers to provide a supportive role in aligning landlord and occupiers’ objectives, kick-starting a much-needed collaborative approach.
In this respect, property managers have a lot of work to do this year, but we have a number of new and improved tools to help us better communicate and better understand objectives around occupation.
The most exciting developments within property management have been building performance platforms that enable managers to collect, monitor and analyse building data to inform and digitalise our approach to management.
We use these systems in three ways: to optimise energy efficiency in existing buildings, improve how comfortable a building is using data analytics and tailoring our management and maintenance regimes to what the data tells us, rather than planning those around what the regulations compel us to do.
Comparing real-time data with the original design aims allows more innovation and the opportunity to correct and modify performance. This will be invaluable for the owners that are combing through portfolios to assess energy footprint and climate adaptation risks; inevitably there will be buildings that do not pass the test. At the same time, there is an acute demand for green buildings that cannot be met by development alone.
As the yield gap between prime and secondary properties is widening in the UK and the Netherlands, where environmental regulations have been introduced, retrofitting is becoming a compelling financial prospect. We expect policy to shift focus onto refurbishment because it can save between 50 and 75 per cent of the embodied carbon emissions compared with a new building.
But whether a building is old or new, a valuable lesson property management teams have learned from being at the forefront of the net zero challenge is that softer initiatives are as critical as any hard benchmarks because they foster collective 'cross-party' teamwork that also brings social value to the wider community.
This means that integral to our day-to-day management are recycling schemes for turning food waste into bio-fertiliser and keeping the wildlife that inhabits our 'portfolios' of beehives happy.
So for the foreseeable future, property managers’ remit will be broader and more collaborative than ever. Decarbonisation may not be a simple build process, but this is true of any architecturally innovative project.
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