Seasonal Savings

6 Tips for Multifamily

By Erica Rascón on Dec 15, 2019 in Energy, News

If sustainability is a part of your branding, the holidays are your time to shine. Did you know that from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, Americans toss about one million extra tons of trash each week? The additional waste is mostly holiday packaging, wrapping, and shipping supplies. Americans are particularly wasteful with energy during the holidays, too. Households in the US consume more energy during the holidays that some countries do in a year.

Multifamily properties can set new precedents for the holidays. Below are six tips to make your property more environmentally friendly and cost efficient. By implementing conservation techniques and rewarding resident participation, we can break the tradition of holiday waste.

Sustainable Switches, Great and Small

Do you have a healthy budget for sustainable upgrades, or are you’re advocating for Mother Earth with your bare hands? Below are a few tips for budgets of any size.

Make the Switch to LEDs If you haven’t already made the switch to LED lights, do so. This includes your holiday lighting. According to Eartheasy, the average business can save about $3,700 per year, per 25 bulbs. Each LED bulb last up to 200,000 hours, meaning that you replace bulbs and strings of lights less often.

Step Up Recycling After the holidays, host recycling hauls for residents. For example, invite residents to bring their outdated electronics down to a truck near the leasing office. It’s then a single trip to recycle tablets and smart phones for the entire community. (Many electronics store offer recycling services.) You can also invite a tree specialist to the property to clear Christmas trees. Some companies will bring a mulching truck and recycle trees on the spot!

Improve Utility Billing Some residents decorate like there is no tomorrow. Others leave town or skip the décor altogether. All residents love knowing that they aren’t paying more than needed on their energy bills (regardless of what’s happening next door).

Improve accuracy with submetering that uses real-time data to calculate cost and consumption. You benefit by recovering vacant unit costs and gathering smart analytics to make informed business decisions.

Residents will appreciate your efforts to protect the environment and live up to your brand’s mission.

Promote More Sustainable Households

Getting residents involved is a great way to fulfill your brand’s mission at a unit level. Below are a few suggestions that are fun, social, and effective.

Let’s Get Social Encourage households to share their sustainable practices on social media and tag your brand. Create superlatives and with small rewards for families that participate. Consider gift cards for The Most Creative Way to Save or community perks for Best Upcycling Project.

Suggestions can help your residents get started. A few ideas: wrap gifts in scarves and other reusable cloth items rather than wrapping paper. Opt for reusable holiday décor instead of single use paper and plastic. Don’t want to wash dishes? No problem. Several brands offer bamboo, hemp, and other fast-renewing disposable materials.

Get Competitive The gamification of energy savings makes it fun and effective. Whether you work through an app or simply through utility bill results, challenge your residents to decrease resource consumption. Pit buildings or floors against one another to get everyone involved!

Shop Local Store Hops Supporting small businesses is good for the local economy and reminds residents why they chose your neighborhood. It also reduces the impact of shipping, warehouse storage, and other concerns associated with online shopping.

Host a shop hop in your community. Use transit to usher residents to shopping hubs and highlight locally owned stores that they may not have visited. No transit? No problem. Ridesharing still reduce costs and the carbon footprint.

Do you like the warm fuzzy, feeling you get when you do something good for the environment? The Yardi Energy Suite facilitates cost savings for multifamily residents and owners alike. Not to mention that there are a host of tools to reduce your footprint! Learn more about our integrated solutions for utility billing, energy management and submeter data administration.