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Page 12 — Property Management Quarterly — July 2017
Sustainability
Property Management
Providing exceptional service to retail clients,
office and industrial markets of any size.
Tailored commerical property management,
with a personal relationship approach.
B y now most of you have
heard the expression “what
you measure, you man-
age.” If we take away the
measuring tool, how do we
assess performance? This is the
exact situation we are facing if the
Energy Star Portfolio Manager tool
is scrapped.
To put it in perspective, imagine
if you were going to the car dealer-
ship to buy a new truck (for haul-
ing) and there is no information
about horsepower, safety, fuel effi-
ciency, towing capacity or how it
rates against other trucks; how do
you make an informed decision?
Energy Star Portfolio Manager
from the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency is the most widely
used tool in the property manage-
ment industry to assess energy
performance of a wide variety of
building types. The CliffsNotes ver-
sion for those of you who are not
familiar with the tool and how it
works, Portfolio Manager needs a
few details to get started – build-
ing type, occupied/vacant square
footage, number of occupants
and computers, operating hours,
energy use for at least one full
year and the building location.
Now, the magic happens. Portfolio
Manager takes the building details
and weather-normalizes the data
to compare similar building types
across the country.
This results in a relative score
from 1 to 100; a score of 50 would
be right in the middle, or the per-
formance of an average building.
The average performance informa-
tion comes from the Commercial
Building Energy
Consumption Sur-
vey data, which is
the basis for the
Energy Star energy
performance scale
(1-100 rating).
To further dial
it down, let’s get
technical for a
moment on site
energy use inten-
sity, or EUI. Port-
folio Manager first
breaks EUI down
by dividing 12
months of energy
use by the building gross square
footage. The EPA then is able to
obtain the source EUI based on the
power plant, which is determined
by the building location. This
number is the amount of energy
“burned” at the power plant per
square foot.
For example, Building A uses 10
million kBTU of energy per year,
and is 100,000 square feet. This
is a site EUI of 100 kBTU per sf.
Typically, we generate almost three
times as much power at the power
plant to deliver that electricity to
the building (that much electricity
is lost over the power-grid distri-
bution system). So, Xcel Energy is
likely generating about 28 million
kBTU at the power plant to deliver
that electricity to the building. This
translates to a source EUI of 280
kBTU per sf. So, I now know my
source EUI is 280 kBTU per sf … but
I don’t know if that is good, bad or
average performance.
The last CBECS survey was com-
pleted in 2012 and included over
16 billion sf of office property data.
The EPA is in the process of updat-
ing the Portfolio Manager tool to
revise “average” building source
EUI and set a new benchmark for
relative performance, showing how
today’s buildings are performing
against peer buildings. However,
the new administration has the
entire Energy Star program on the
chopping block in the 2018 pro-
posed budget – along with more
than 50 other programs, which
would cut the EPA’s overall funding
by 31 percent.
Why This Matters
In the information age, this is a def-
inite step backward. Tenants will pay
a premium in buildings with strong,
measurable performance. A July 2014
study of the L.A. real estate market
released by CoStar showed that aver-
age rent for 1,975 nongreen buildings
was $2.16 per sf, while average rent
for 296 Energy Star certified buildings
was $2.69 per sf.
Owners profit off of strong perfor-
mance in another way. The same
report found the average sales price
of nongreen buildings was $244 per
Amanda
Timmons, LEED
AP O+M
President, Ampajen
Solutions LLC,
Denver
Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager is being used for mandatory benchmarking in many cities
and states across the nation.