‍SUCCESS SNAPSHOT

• Quickly communicate, report, and plan
• Controlling portfolio performance against individual NABERS ratings
• Receiving notifications to monitor performance against NABERS ratings
• Greater visibility for improved portfolio performance and NABERS rating

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"The Switch Platform aggregates countless different data sources from our buildings, enabling my team to keep a constant eye on portfolio performance in real-time. Notifications and continuous measurement against NABERS standards have hugely augmented accountability around our third party vendors and the Platform’s reporting functionality has really impressed our stakeholders and management." - Regional Facilities Manager

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The Opportunity

The National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) evaluates environmental performance and assigns the resulting star-rating for every building. Not only is it federally mandated to disclose NABERS ratings for any commercial building larger than 1000m, but it also impacts customer acquisition and competitive differentiation for organizations that consider real estate a part of their business.

This leading investment house in Australia wanted control over how their portfolio performs against individual NABERS ratings. Because they have a large portfolio of more than 50 buildings, the team found it especially difficult to track the average ratings by the various reporting methods. Understanding the context of their NABERS ratings across the portfolio was critical for three specific reasons.

Firstly, they want to hold their property management team accountable. The sustainability team is held to NABERS-based KPIs. So, to fairly evaluate and further develop the individuals on that team, they need to understand who is responsible for which ratings. They’re also determined to up-skill their facility management teams to be extremely technically proficient.

Next, they wanted to improve their competitive standing. Australia’s National NABERS rating average is 4.2 stars, but this particular customer had several competitors who averaged extremely highly on the scale. There is a huge competitive advantage to improve NABERS ratings and thus leverage the public branding implications.

Finally, they want to justify their resourcing. To increase budgets or adjust CAPEX, the sustainability team needs an honest, real-time assessment of their NABERS ratings. Understanding the relationship between NABERS ratings and building needs will help inform equipment replacement strategies and draw the rationale to adjust budgets accordingly.

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Solutions

The Switch NABERS rating feature leverages the official NABERS algorithm to help this CRE organization assess exactly how their buildings are tracking in real-time. They opted to receive email notifications that highlight:

• Graphs plotting the monthly rating averages
• A summary of the inputs used in the rating algorithm
• The current estimate rating for historical, daily and the sites they manage
• An indication if they’re tracking on or below their target

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Clicking through the email, they’re directed to that specific building in the Switch Platform to further investigate and adjust strategy. From here, they can view the 15-minute-interval data of a building’s electricity consumption and pin point where they can reduce energy usage.

This alleviated the need, cost and time commitment to manually logging in to multiple systems, or working with consultants, and gave them a process to prioritize threats and opportunities across the portfolio.

Now that the team has real-time visibility on their ratings tracking, they’re planning for more in-depth studies to determine how to align their equipment replacement strategy with their NABERS targets. The cross-section of data gives them a way to optimize their CAPEX, while achieving their NABERS targets—something they previously had to manually consider.

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Outcomes

This CRE organization is leveraging their new visibility to strategically communicate, report and program-plan. By consolidating data from various sources and standardizing it to one interpretable metric, our customer now prioritizes key improvement opportunities across their systems and processes.

With this new level of transparency, the property management team is empowered to take ownership of cost management and the C-Suite could more fairly reward positive performance. By enabling real-time reporting, the team targeted and rectified systems issues, resulting in immediate energy savings and subsequent NABERS performance. Through cross comparison of this rich new data flow, our customer gleans valuable insights on how to improve building system function by right-sizing its resourcing to match high priority needs.

Excellent NABERS ratings are quickly becoming a business necessity in the increasingly competitive tenancy space. So why is something that is so important to the bottom line only ever tracked once a year? The NABERS tracker brought, what is generally a fuzzy, far away target into daily focus and scrutiny for all stakeholders in the company. This gave them the power to quickly identify and resolve problems before they cause a dent in annual ratings.