Why should property managers care about building data?

The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is making 'Intelligent Buildings' a core competence for Corporate Real Estate and adding 'Big Data' for Facilities Management. Building data will affect the human experience in offices and property valuations. Insights from building data, specifically data on the Building Management System (BMS) network, can enable property management to:

• Increase operating income by reducing costs and minimising voids
• Improve comfort and well-being, reducing complaints & illness, and increase productivity
• Manage insurance risks, avoid interruptions to operations, minimise claims and costs
• Cut carbon emissions and energy costs to 'green' the property
• Reduce contractor risk and likelihood of capital work defects
• Deliver FM services in the most effective way at the least possible cost
• Plan space utilisation effectively and service consolidation successfully

Some property managers take a hands-on interest in the building engineering, but often they are too busy and tend to leave the details of the BMS and HVAC to their contracted engineers. Unfortunately, this misses an opportunity and it means the valuable data on the BMS network remains locked away in the engineer's control room, often in the basement. The valuable thing about the BMS network is that it is usually connected to the majority of the equipment in the buildings as well as to sensors for monitoring the human experience in the building. Adding more data points, like air quality and occupancy, can be an easy addition to this existing network and does not require a whole new system.

Today, most BMS are not capable of providing business intelligence for property managers. They run the HVAC system as a hidden comfort factory, locked away behind closed doors and hidden in walls, ceiling and floors. Whilst there are 10,000s of data points which could provide useful insight, the property manager doesn't even get to glimpse the tip of this data pyramid. Property managers could use this data and analyse it for business intelligence to set their service apart and maximise the real estate value for the owner and for the occupants.

Demand Logic provides a 24-hour digital makeover service which reveals this data in an intelligent way. Like a Fitbit for Buildings we reduce the complex operation of a building down into simple KPIs which can be used to benchmark performance and quickly identify the problem areas requiring attention by the operations team. This is changing the way properties are being managed and it is being used by BT, CBRE, JLL, LandSec, Mace Macro, MJ Mapp, RBS, Santander, TfL, The Crown Estate and TIAA-Henderson Real Estate, amongst others.