Utility Tracking and Benchmarking Blog | WegoBlog

As more and more people leave single-family and multi-family suburban homes, they begin to move towards the city. Places like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles are flooded with young professionals who are on the look-out for apartments that will make their wallet feel comfortable while being close to their work place. For these young professionals, moving allows them to develop their career path in a fast-paced , urban environment. A city like Boston, where WegoWise, Inc. is based, can tell you that living in a city where there is growth in demand for downtown living causes limited housing space. Enter micro units, a small sized apartment, perfect for one or two, that just might be a new and innovative way of living in urban downtowns.

In 2009, multifamily residents spent $22 billion in energy utilities, amounting to roughly 10% of the total residential spending on utilities. If you think that’s a significant chunk of cash, by 2025, spending on utilities in the multifamily sector is predicted to increase an additional $15.9 billion.  This increase represents a significant opportunity to use our utility resources to improve the energy efficiency of multifamily homes, which tend to receive the short end of the stick when it comes to utility funded energy efficiency programs.  Last week, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) published a report, “Scaling up Multifamily Energy Efficiency Programs: A Metropolitan Area Assessment,” with all the information your heart could possibly desire about multifamily energy efficiency programs.  Didn’t have time to read the report yet? We’ll break it down for you.

At a launch event on February 6^th at the HUD regional office, WegoWise was on hand as Boston LISC unveiled their recently published guide for “Green & Healthy Property Management”.  The guide provides an incredible resource for affordable as well as market rate multifamily housing owners to explicitly define and apply green measures within their portfolios.  In this post, we’ll highlight the most important features of this publication, but encourage our readers to check it out in its entirety! 

Last month, the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) made the results from the first year of the LEAN Multifamily Benchmarking Inventory available to the public.

Multifamily housing presents an excellent opportunity for energy efficiency measures for three primary reasons. First, much of this housing stock is old: according to the Energy Programs Consortium, 85% of multifamily housing in the United States was constructed before 1990. This means many of the structures need repairs and most have building systems that are outdated. Next, the physical characteristics of multifamily housing, such as exterior exposure per residence, make it easier to perform retrofits. And finally, the larger scale of these types of properties means that improvements result in larger total reductions in usage and larger financial savings. Due to these factors, EPC found that multifamily buildings could save anywhere from 30 – 75% of energy through efficiency measures. We’ve observed this ourselves through the work we’ve been doing in Massachusetts with the LEAN Multifamily Benchmarking Inventory. In some cases, owners have reduced their energy bill by more than 50% through retrofits.

A near constant challenge for every property manager with whom we work, is trying to get their tenants interested in saving energy. One would think the obvious monetary benefits would be enough but what about those tenants who don't pay utility bills? This blog posts owes thanks to several very clever property managers who shared their green-tenant event calendars with the world.

It seems like not a day goes by without people in our office gathering around the proverbial water-cooler (which in our case is a non-proverbial foosball table) and discussing the Olympics. This got us thinking, and blogging, about how we could reward our customers for their energy and money savings, as if the savings themselves weren't reward enough. So we created the WegOlympics and combed through our database of almost 10,000 buildings to pick the winners. Our Opening Ceremony, in which we chronicled the brief history and meteoric rise of WegoWise through interpretive energy tracking, did not get as much media coverage as the boondoggle in London, but we are hoping that our Medal Ceremony can turn the tables in our favour. Based on a similar judging system as the Men's Gymnastics Floor Routine, we have hand-picked the winners of this year's 2012 WegOlympics. Here are your winners. You have made your country very proud.

With energy efficiency becoming increasingly important as cities strive to be green, benchmarking has become a standard in cities like New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and most recently, in DC!  The Clean and Affordable Energy Act of 2008 requires all private buildings over 50,000 gross square feet in DC to report their energy use to the District Department of the Environment.  WegoWise is here to break down the facts and tell you the top ten things you need to know if you are a building owner in DC:

Using "utility allowances" and "fun" in the same sentence is a bit of a stretch, but knowledgeable property owners can increase profitability through good management of utility costs.  Affordable housing property owners have to continually find a balance between the revenues they can generate through rent and their tenants' utility costs.  Most affordable properties are subject to a "gross rent" limit.  The gross rent limit is the maximum combined amount tenants can pay each month in rent and utility expenses.  High utility costs for the tenants means lower rent revenue for owners.  Some progressive developers have started to take concrete steps to ensure they maximize the rent they can collect.   

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. This week we take a look at some ways multifamily properties are making their footprint a bit smaller and some ways to do so.  So peruse our best links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you are hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Sean, Lily, Catherine, and Casey.