How to Use CRE Software to Attain Sustainability Goals

CRE_Software_Sustainability
Your company's commercial real estate software isn't only a tool to help manage your portfolio. Many of the cost containment tools that are built in can also be used to help reduce your company's environmental impact. Controlling operating costs, maximizing density and reducing employee drive times and distances can all help you achieve sustainability goals while reducing operating expenses.

Let's take a look at some features of commercial real estate software that can provide your company some 'green' support:

Benchmark Occupancy

Wasted space carries both a financial and an ecological cost. Ultimately, your space needs heat and light whether or not it's occupied. While it can be relatively easy to identify vacant spaces and shut them down, it can be more challenging to identify inefficient spaces.

Commercial real estate software can help you generate metrics like employees per square foot for office space, sales per square foot for retail or capacity utilization ratios for warehouses. Spaces with higher ratios are typically more efficient than lower ones. While your office with 6 employees per 1000 square feet might be a model for your entire organization, one with 3 employees is probably ripe for consolidation.

Benchmarking your sites against others in your portfolio and against current market conditions is a great tool for determining cost efficiency and environmental performance.

Manage Utility Costs

Analyzing utility related operating costs is a basic property management task. However, utility costs have a deeper meaning than just showing the money you're spending. When you drill down to usage levels, leaving the varying cost per therm or kilowatt-hour out of the equation; you're actually looking at a direct measurement of your company's environmental footprint. Commercial real estate software can help you do this and quickly benchmark properties against each other.

Looking at usage on both a per square foot and per employee basis can help you understand which of your spaces are green and which aren't. Creating ranked regional tables is one of best ways to do this. Regionalizing your data is important because weather and daylight patterns impact energy usage. For instance, your Phoenix office will need more summer-time air conditioning and electricity than your Minneapolis office, while your Minneapolis office burns more electricity for lighting in winter due to the shorter days that come from its northern latitude.

Once you've used commercial real estate software to benchmark your spaces, you can also track the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives. For instance, a program to shut down computers and lights at night should have similar results in offices of similar sizes. If one office shows a lesser reduction than others, it could indicate that the office isn't compliant with the new requirement.

Strategic Site Selection

Local facility managers should be able to give you a sense of which sites are centrally located for commuting and which are not. While it might not be in your business plan to break your lease and immediately find a new, optimally located space, your commercial real estate software can help you identify which sites are nearing the end of their lease.

Some commercial real estate software applications can also help you calculate the cost of changing sites. Software that loads market data can display what competing sites cost in terms of rent and operating expenses. This lets you identify a space that enjoys both a better location and attractive terms. The mapping functions built into the software can also help you visualize how the property sits relative to the area in which it is located. A sustainable site selection reduces environmental impact of employees driving to the office, delivery trucks driving to and from distribution centers and the costs associated with both.