Utility expenses are one of the biggest controllable expenses in commercial buildings. Yet an average commercial building wastes 30% of its energy consumption due to inefficiencies and lack of proper management. This highlights an opportunity to take a more proactive approach on measuring energy consumption and implementing solutions to improve how a commercial building operates. A reduction in energy consumption is good for the bottom line and is great for the environment. It is estimated that a reduction of between 25% and 30% in real estate energy emissions could in turn help the US and other nations hit the Paris Agreement targets within the next 10 years, which would be a remarkable achievement. Yardi has developed a comprehensive energy management platform for commercial and build-to-rent real estate portfolios called Yardi Pulse. We believe having a better understanding of utility and energy consumption is an important ‑ first step in developing strategies to reduce consumption and improve efficiencies in how a building operates. Our energy solutions have been available in the US, for a number of years and are currently being deployed to international markets, including the UK. Yardi solutions have traditionally been focused on servicing the back o­ffice of real estate investors, owners and operators to manage their property portfolios using Voyager – our enterprise resource planning platform. This focus on real estate has allowed us to gain a deep understanding and data set of how buildings are managed, the expenses associated with utilities and the costs associated with running the mechanical and plant operations in a building. Yardi Pulse has been created as a software-driven energy strategy that is comprehensive in terms of functionality, easy to use and provides a short payback period for clients. Yardi Pulse has three core functional modules. Utility Expense Management is crucial to understanding and documenting energy consumption in a building and across a portfolio. By leveraging machine learning to provide automated validations to ensure that utility expenses are correct, late fees, bill errors and over payments can be reduced. Detailed consumption data in turn helps provide valuable portfolio benchmarking. This granular consumption data in turn becomes the starting point to build an effective energy strategy. Energy Intelligence is the second building block, which is fuelled by real-time data being collected through Internet of Things (IoT) real-time metering devices installed in the buildings. This enables visibility to compare usage, savings and spikes between time periods across an entire portfolio to highlight outliers. This data allows clients to make incremental but powerful changes. Energy e­fficiency Energy Automation is the third building block, designed to maximize building performance with energy automation technology that prevents HVAC system problems by proactively detecting faults and providing alerts. This also allows clients to automate their heating and cooling to optimize tenant comfort and minimize wasted HVAC costs. Tackling the energy e­fficiency of a building can be daunting, as it is often difficult to understand where to start or how to calculate the benefit of an investment. We have found that an incremental strategy by focusing on first gaining visibility into consumption and demand can reduce costs by 2% to 5%. Over time, building owners and operators can identify their highest cost/highest ROI assets as candidates for energy automation. This then leads to additional cost savings exceeding 10% to 15%. We expect cost savings to increase, as we further develop artificial intelligence and machine learning engines to analyse larger data sets on consumption as well as other data points that will be collected with the deployment of additional IoT sensors in buildings. The market has also seen an increase in demand from investors and tenants for more energy efficient buildings. From an investor perspective, an energy-efficient building is one of their investment criteria. Not only does an energy-e­fficient building increase the appeal of the investor, but it also tracks higher-value tenants that rank sustainability and energy e­fficiency in their decision...