Disruption in commercial property management
As the commercial property management sector undergoes rapid transformation and disruption, the role of facility management is also evolving to meet new demands and challenges.
Traditionally, facility management focused on maintaining building services, ensuring compliance, and addressing maintenance needs. However, in today's dynamic landscape, facility managers are faced with broader responsibilities and are expected to take on a more strategic role.
The commercial property management sector encounters significant challenges that facility management must address.
Major challenges facing facility management
Changing Tenant Requirements
Tenants now proritise sustainable, healthy, and comfortable buildings. Employee comfort has become a key factor in assessing facility management, especially as companies aim to attract employees back to the office.
Regulatory Restrictions
Increasingly stringent legislation regarding carbon emissions reduction, energy consumption, and environmental factors necessitates adaptability and compliance in facility management practices. Staying in line with the GRESB or obtaining ISO 50001 certification can help with this.
Escalating Energy Prices
Managing costs has become crucial to prevent long-term reductions in return on investments from building portfolios. Facility and commercial real estate managers must ensure that rising energy prices do not negatively impact rental margins or on their own.
Fragmented and Siloed Data
Proprietary equipment, sensors, and different software result in fragmented datasets making comprehensive data analysis and decision-making extremely challenging for facility management.
Lack of Real-Time Data
Without up-to-date information on energy use, air quality, insulation, equipment, and maintenance levels across building systems and multiple sites, diagnosing problems and making informed decisions becomes another major challenge.
All these factors are contributing to the rapid evolution of facility management. With tenants and occupants expecting advanced building capabilities and green features, the role of facility management has expanded to include aspects of IT and HR. Facility managers must be tech-savvy and capable of managing multi-channel responsibilities.
Regulation in commercial property management
Regulation in commercial property development is also forcing change. The introduction of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) in the EU in 2012 has been responsible for improved energy efficiency across the EU because now large organisations are required reduce GHG emissions, progress towards net zero buildings , and publish accurate data on energy performance.
To achieve these goals, measuring, monitoring, and controlling all energy-consuming processes and systems is crucial, such as the energy used for lighting, heating, and cooling, and to run all the appliances in your buildings.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and the adoption of smart building technologies, and energy management software (as a service) have revolutionised facility management. Facility management can now operate assets more efficiently, access instant data on everything, and balance optimal energy efficiency, comfort, and air quality.
Energy management - a Critical Priority for Facilities
Although the commercial property management and real estate sectors have been slower to adapt to these technologies, they are now gaining momentum and embracing all the opportunities they present. CoolPlanetOS offers many ways to optimise energy management across real estate portfolios, ultimately making the job of facilities and commercial property management a much easier job (remember, energy planning is just one aspect of their overall role) but here are just five ways to get you started and saving many a headache and valuable time:
Analysis of multiple energy sources
Gain reliable insights into energy performance by considering all energy sources consumed or produced in your buildings, including electricity, water, natural gas, thermal energy, fuel oil tanks, and renewable energy generators.
Save time with automated reporting and alerts
Automate energy reporting with customisable reports for different stakeholders. Data can be sourced from multiple platforms (invoices, building management systems, IoT sensors, SCADA or databases) making it easy to identify energy efficiency gaps and savings opportunities. Furthermore, you can perform tenant billing and reporting at scale, effortlessly.
Costs, benchmarking & audit
Understand the true cost of energy usage based on time-of-use tariffs, analyse supplier costs, and simulate different pricing structures. Compare energy consumption patterns (based on weather of location etc) with similar buildings, providing insights for effective measures. CoolPlanetOS enables CREs with complex portfolios to perform major energy efficiency virtual audits with one click.
Understanding your carbon footprint
Demonstrate compliance and achieve decarbonisation goals, converting energy consumption into GHG emissions, and uncover multiple reduction opportunities. Generate carbon emissions reports effortlessly.
Energy savings verification
Create a measurement and verification plan to track project savings. Detailed reports can be generated for various energy-saving measures or calculated based on consumption baselines for the entire building portfolio.
By implementing these strategies, facilities management and commercial property management can improve energy efficiency, reduce costs, comply with sustainability goals, and make properly informed decisions to get the very best from their energy management practices.
