Want to cut costs on energy? The National Apartment Association (NAA) Education Conference session entitled Return On Energy: Sustainable Case Studies for Catching Up offered several helpful tips for keeping costs low and residents happy. The session featured Martin Levkus, Regional Director, Yardi Energy; Tom Turnbull, Senior Engineer, JDM Associates; and moderator, Erin Hatcher, LEED Sustainability Manager & Development Associate with AMLI. Hatcher kicked off the session with a question to the audience: “in-house or out-of-house?” Some multifamily owners and operators, like AMLI, have the infrastructure in-house to do their own sustainability and energy efficiency projects. Others, need to outsource to experts if they don’t have the personnel or expertise to do it all themselves. Although both methods have pros and cons, there are some key tips that either method can use to help your properties operate optimally. Data + Analysis = Cost Savings You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Yardi has helped numerous businesses decrease utility expenses with the help of software and Levkus’ advice: “It all starts with a utility bill.” Before you can take down the low hanging fruit, you need to use data to identify it. Levkus referred to a case study including 14,600 units across 260 properties. The organization spent $50,000 – $100,00 in late fees each year. With better bill processing integrated into one software solution, they reduced late fees for roughly $75,000 in annual savings. Beyond paying the utility bills on time, you also want to make sure the bills have accurate charges. A separate Yardi study revealed that for a residential property management business spending $32 million per year on utilities across 63,000 invoices, there were significant billing errors by the utility company equallying $388,000 across two years – 0.55 percent of spend. Yardi’s goal...

For facility managers, seasonal changes are always a challenge. External temperatures fluctuate. Occupant attire straddles the coverage spectrum. You can tell by the flood of emails that you receive (and the dirty looks that you get at lunch) that occupant comfort is not optimal.  It doesn’t have to be that way. Occupant comfort is a tricky science. As a facility manager, you balance the temperatures between 72° – 76° F for your office spaces because you know the workers will be sedentary. In more active environments, like retail and schools, you drop the temperatures between 68° – 74° F. You know that these temperature ranges will keep about 90 percent of the occupants happy, which is the industry standard. Yet the ASHRAE recommended temperature ranges are broad enough to cause discomfort amongst the 90 percent, especially during changes in season. Biological differences play a role in comfortable conditions. Yardi LOBOS® (Load Based Optimization System) for commercial properties makes it easier to achieve optimal occupant comfort while saving energy even during seasonal transitions. LOBOS is an intelligent HVAC energy optimization software platform that can help you maximize efficiency, by automating demand management, peak load reduction. and demand response events. It does this by sending temperature, pressure, and speed set point adjustment signals to the existing HVAC components every 60 seconds to produce just enough cooling resources to satisfy the cooling demand in the spaces The LOBOS Cloud automatically stores HVAC trend data that operators find useful in creating a host of ad hoc reports of system operation and performance. The LOBOS software suite gives you a complete understanding of how your building is performing and automatically makes subtle real-time adjustments to maximize occupant comfort and energy savings. Adding LOBOS to an existing HVAC system typically...