Operational costs such as energy have always been
an opportunity for landlords and managers to improve
margins. EnergyUserNews.com indicates that in a 500,000
square foot (ft 2) building with average energy
costs of $1.80/ft 2, cutting costs by 25%
will produce $250,000 in enhanced NOI. At a 10% capitalization
rate this could amount to a $2.5 million increase
in property value.
There are many ways to increase energy efficiency
both in the design for planned buildings and retrofits
for existing buildings. Further, there are a number
of energy management solutions that will run on The
Fourth Utility®.
But the challenge is to know how efficient your
design or existing building is in the first place
and what changes would produce what results. Historically,
energy efficiency analysis is an expensive process that
involves many man hours and reams of static data. Hence,
it is rarely done. However, rising energy costs as a
whole and instability in oil specifically is bringing
this issue to the forefront.
As a result, Intelligent Buildings and the Georgia
Institute of Technology are co-developing a building
performance software rating tool for the commercial
real estate industry. This will be an enhanced, commercial
version of a tool that was developed for GSA (Government
Services Administration) at Georgia Tech under the leadership
of Dr. Godfried Agenbroe. Further enhancements and development
could be subsidized by grants. The software tool will
quickly and accurately rate a property against
peer buildings and compensate for climate, type of tenant,
building materials and other factors. Intelligent
Buildings owns exclusive licensing rights to devlop
and sell the commercial verion of the building performance
toolkit.
Intelligent Buildings will work with a variety of
integrators and manufactures and the building owner
to create suitable remedies for the gaps identified
by the Toolkit. Current relationships include Eaton
and Richards-Zeta.
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