Energy Trackers: multifamily building benchmarking

Miles Orth wasn’t surprised last summer when e-mails started flooding Campus Apartments’ online resident customer service portal at one of the firm’s Tucson, Ariz., properties. Campus was replastering the community pool and expected some pushback from the Gen Y University of Arizona students. But these e-mails weren’t asking when Joe and Jane Co-ed could resume their fun in the sun. Instead, residents were asking—in droves—what Campus had done with the pool water, and what attempts were being made to recycle and otherwise conserve energy and resources at the property.   

“We had 25 residents in separate e-mails ask us what we did with the water,” Orth says. “Unfortunately, we had already drained it, and, of course, the chlorination makes reuse somewhat challenging, but we’re fortunate that student residents are very into sustainability and environmental initiatives. These are very smart, confident young people who want to save the world, and they want to start with where they live.”

According to Orth, it was student activism that led Campus Apartments to switch all of its community incandescent bulbs to CFLs two years ago, and that same activism is now pushing for LED lighting to replace CFL lighting in the parking lots and appropriate common areas. Add to that efforts to install water-saving devices in bathrooms and switch out obsolete and inefficient boiler and HVAC systems, and you’ve got a full-on sustainability business unit to manage. “Across our national portfolio, one of the things we’ve been trying to work on over the past several years is benchmarking,” Orth says. “In particular, trying to determine what are the right ways to go about finding the information to improve the infrastructure we have and add to some of the sustainability initiatives we’ve begun.”

The payoff is clear: Operators, utility billing specialists, policymakers, and green building experts agree that energy benchmarking creates specific opportunities to add to NOI. What’s more, the penalization is looming: Municipalities across the country will eventually mandate benchmarking. In New York City, Local Law 84 requires benchmarking using the EPA’s Portfolio Manager tool and will apply to most Big Apple apartment buildings as of May 1. Similar mandates are under way in Seattle; San Francisco; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C., and expectations are that benchmarking regulations will only proliferate (see “Power Policies,” below).

Put more simply, Campus Apartments—like the majority of multifamily apartment operators—is trying to figure out how much energy its apartment communities consume, how much that energy costs, and how to reduce both consumption and costs over time. And benchmarking is taking a front-row seat in this effort....