Introduction
Earlier this year, we released the Insider’s Buyer Guide to Operations Technology for CRE.
This guide was written in response to the nearly unanimous sentiment in commercial real estate that there are too many technology offerings to possibly evaluate, that even defining the goal can be challenging and there’s simply not enough information to make a decision on a direction.
Ultimately, this perpetuates the status quo, pushes technology decisions to individual properties, increases siloing of systems, and reduces competitiveness.
The Buyer’s Guide was an ambitious project, coming out to 12 pages densely packed with use cases, pitfalls to avoid and providers in each space. Despite focusing only on operations, the guide covered a wide range of technologies, from basic asset tagging to predictive maintenance and everything in between.
Because of this breadth, we could only go so deep on any individual category of technologies.
Due to popular demand, this article will expand on one of those categories: the indoor environmental monitoring section of Floor 2 - Optimization.
Air Quality Monitoring
Background
Many people spend more than 90% of their time indoors. Under-ventilated spaces in buildings have been linked to a range of ailments - headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, coughs, dizziness, nausea, and irritation of the eye, nose, throat and skin.
Poor ventilation has been blamed for increased absences from work, decreased productivity and asthma.
None of this is news to the industry, but the pandemic has brought a new urgency to the matter. COVID-19 spreads between people less by close contact and infected surfaces and more by hitching a ride on aerosol particles from people’s lungs that can linger in the air of an ill-ventilated room.
Achieving clean, pathogen-free air in buildings is possible. Just as importantly for commercial real estate owners and operators, proving to tenants that the building is safe is possible as well.
Use Case and Setup
The first step is to give both operators and tenants more information on how well-ventilated the air is.
Temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide concentrations are a good proxy for ventilation, and inexpensive wireless sensors can be installed in short order.
From there, basic thresholds can be set to determine if measurements are within acceptable ranges.
For the building staff, alerts can be sent directly to a mobile app, along with tracking of resolutions. For tenants, these measurements can be displayed in lobbies and common spaces as simple green, yellow, red outputs.
For example, outdoor air contains 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 and people’s exhaled breath contains around 40,000 ppm. Exhaling gradually raises it’s CO2 concentrations unless the ventilation is good enough to remove the excess.
Anything below 500 ppm is good. At 800 ppm 1% of the air someone is breathing has already been exhaled recently by someone else. At 4,400 ppm, this rises to 10% and would be classified as dangerous.
Value Proposition
The biggest value proposition gets at the heart of what it means to own and operate commercial real estate: showing tenants the value of their space.
Landlords cannot control what happens outside their doors, but the space, whether that is an apartment building, office, facility, store or hotel, should be managed to the standards that tenants expect.
Indoor air quality and proper ventilation will drive leasing and renewal decisions for years to come. Even if it makes up 1% of the overall decision, monitoring air quality would deliver annual returns of 500% or more.
Pitfalls to Avoid
There is much more that can be tracked besides temperature, humidity and CO2. This includes particulate matter, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide and others.
Particulate matter in particular has confused many owners and operators. There are some providers that claim to be able to track particulates down to the size of individual pathogens (such as COVID-19), and use that data to determine safety.
The problem is that there are many particulates in the air that are as small as pathogens but completely harmless. In addition, small pathogens often attach themselves to larger particulates, essentially making the measurement completely ineffective for this purpose.
Providers
- Enertiv
- WellStat
- Senseware
- Awair
Maintenance & Equipment Monitoring
Background
There are many reasons outside of air quality to streamline maintenance and deploy equipment monitoring, including direct reductions to operating expenses through maintenance and energy savings and avoiding breakdowns that lead to tenant complaints.
In addition to those stand alone reasons, digitized maintenance and real-time monitoring ensures that the systems responsible for ventilation are running as designed.
Use Case and Setup
There are generally two phases to a setup like this. First, there is the digitization of information and workflows, and then the integration of real-time data to enhance the experience and deliver insights that couldn’t otherwise be identified.
Digitization through asset tags creates an equipment inventory in the cloud and can generally be completed by on-site operators in an afternoon. The next week or two is often spent importing, creating and/or updating rounds and preventative maintenance schedules into a mobile app experience.
The equipment inventory created has value on its own, making it easy to find and share valuable information, especially when not on site. Just as importantly however, it creates the information necessary to determine which systems should be monitored.
Once that is determined, monitoring can be performed either by integrating with a building automation system already in place or by deploying sensors that track individual pieces of equipment. This data is fed into an analytics engine that calculates costs, identifies insights, calculates runtime hours and mean time to repair, and sends real-time alerts.
Value Proposition
Digitizing routine maintenance saves operator time, generally producing a 150% annual return on investment. The real-time data from equipment monitoring often brings this return up to 400%.
As importantly in the post-COVID-19 world, this digitization gives owners and operators the speed and access to information expected going forward.
For example, for the first time ever, tenants are asking for the HVAC operations and maintenance plan before signing a lease. Instead of that information being siloed to the chief engineer and risking frustrating the tenant, it can be instantly accessible to anyone in the organization, as well as evidence that it is being rigorously followed.
With real-time monitoring, breakdowns can be caught immediately and resolved before tenants notice or air quality is affected.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Preventative maintenance is a tricky area because it often falls in between the more property management-focused platforms, which allow tenants to submit work orders, and the more operations-focused platforms, which have more engineering information.
There is no absolute right answer, but it should be thought through in relation to other technologies being evaluated and whether there would be a benefit from being closer to engineering (asset tagging, real-time air quality and equipment monitoring, etc.) than property management (tenant work orders).
For equipment monitoring options, many providers are limited to the systems in scope of the building automation system (BAS). Unless there is confidence that every system in every building in the portfolio has a modern BAS with an open networking protocol, finding a vendor that can also deploy stand-alone sensors should be prioritized.
Maintenance Providers
- Enertiv
- Angus Anywhere
- Building Engines
- Yardi Voyager
Equipment Monitoring Providers
- Enertiv
Conclusion
Even after COVID-19 fades as a public health concern, the emphasis from tenants on indoor air quality will not.
For example, tenants now understand that low relative humidity, as often encountered indoors during winter, facilitates evaporation and keeps even initially large droplets suspended in air for extended periods of time.
The truth is, most colds, flus and other respiratory illnesses spread mostly through aerosols (airborne transmission) rather than droplets (direct exposure to coughs and sneezes).
Many landlords have already faced questions about the number of air changes per hour, the percentage of outdoor air in their spaces, CO2 levels, and relative humidity. And in fact, these are the right questions for tenants to be asking.
The bottom line is that, in order to maintain competitiveness, commercial landlords need to be able to monitor air quality, be willing to display that information publicly, and have the tools on the backend to ensure that ventilation systems are working properly.
The Enertiv Platform can serve as a centralized source for air quality monitoring, maintenance workflows and equipment monitoring. Schedule a demo today to see it in action.
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