4 Essential Commercial Property Management Best Practices

Commercial property managers have a lot to deal with. They are constantly working to find and sustain tenants, adapt to changing market demands, and adjust to new occupants. Balancing these needs with the needs of the building itself can be a challenge.

The internal workings of your buildings—HVAC, lighting systems, water usage, etc.—traditionally aren’t on the same side of the ledger as tenant issues, but both impact your bottom line. And, increasingly, the two sides of the business are connected. Today, commercial property management best practices recommend using advanced technology stacks with analytics to improve the occupant experience while optimizing energy efficiency and building performance.

How an Integrated Analytics Platform Promotes Commercial Property Management Best Practices

Commercial buildings produce extraordinary volumes of data, particularly as building owners begin to integrate an ever-expanding range of IoT devices and sensors within their properties. Unifying building systems via a state-of-the-art integration engine and deploying intelligent analytics is critical for making this data meaningful and opening up new opportunities for managing commercial properties. 

Here are the 4 top commercial property management best practices enabled by analytics-enhanced integration:

1. Better Space Utilization

Space utilization is a huge topic for owners looking to maximize the value of their properties, facilities managers looking to improve operations, and tenants looking to make the most out of their lease. 

Space utilization boils down to one thing: how many people can occupy a space without being wasteful or overcrowded. Determining how much space people need vs. how space is being used can help you identify underutilized areas and refine your management practices to optimize efficiency.

Key metrics to consider:

• Daily peak utilization by space
• Average peak usage in any given zone
• Point-in-time occupancy

Occupancy sensor data is the best way to gain these insights. With continuous monitoring of occupancy and analysis of occupancy data over time, facility managers and tenants can understand which areas see the most traffic, which are under-used, and how occupancy changes according to variables like time of day. 

This information can help tenants optimize everything from workflow to conference room scheduling to shift management. For facility managers, it can shape resource allocation and refine everything from physical building design to equipment use.

2. Increase Energy Efficiency Without Sacrificing Comfort

When an analytics platform understands how people actually use buildings, smart systems can get smarter and more efficient. Energy-intensive building systems like HVAC and lighting can adjust to changing conditions in real time—or even preemptively. Air conditioning can increase in conference rooms as they fill up and heat rises throughout the day. Lights can be shut off in unused rooms and dimmed in those illuminated by natural light. The heat can be turned up just before the work day starts and lowered when the building empties. 

This data-driven automation ensures tenants stay comfortable without even having to think about it. It also ensures that energy is used where and when it is needed rather than being wasted.

3. Demonstrate Real Environmental Benefits

Commercial space tenants may have cared about air quality before the pandemic. But now, it has taken on a new level of importance. A well-architected system led by advanced analytics can offer room-by-room insights and more control over air quality, allowing you to protect the health and safety of occupants. For example, ventilation can adjust automatically according to air quality sensor data and occupancy.

Significantly, you can show tenants (and prospective tenants) quantifiable air quality measurements. You don’t just have to claim that your building is a safe space, you can prove it with objective data, giving you a valuable way to attract and retain tenants.

Air quality data also allows you to see the impact of improvement initiatives, like HEPA filters, giving you a better understanding of what measures are worth taking and which are ineffective.

4. Streamline Maintenance 

Analytics often isn’t seen as a maintenance optimization tool, but in many ways, it is just that. By continuously analyzing data, an intelligent platform can identify anomalies immediately and make automatic adjustments to setpoints or send alerts to relevant stakeholders when an issue demands manual intervention. It can also make recommendations for how to address malfunctions and inefficiencies.

One of the highlights of platforms with advanced fault detection and diagnostics capabilities is the ability to isolate issues in complex systems and cut down on nuisance alarms. That smooths out the maintenance process by not wasting time fixing issues that don’t matter and enabling operators to more quickly resolve issues that do need their support. Problems can be anticipated or resolved in their earliest stages, preventing catastrophic equipment failure and prolonged downtime that may affect tenants. 

An analytics platform also assists with communication and compliance by giving managers a central location to:

• Submit work orders
• Dispatch contractors
• Track progress 
• Validate fixes

Less paperwork, more accuracy, and greater transparency are all instrumental parts of commercial property management best practices.

The Best Way to Institute Best Practices

Traditionally, the front of the house and the back were in different worlds. But the demands of modern commercial tenants deeply inform the operational side, and operations largely determine whether tenants sign and stay. 

An analytics platform like onPoint helps managers unify the two sides. This innovative platform offers deep visibility into building systems and helps facility managers improve the tenant experience while reducing waste, optimizing efficiency, and streamlining maintenance. When onPoint is deployed as part of a fully integrated building management system, it offers tremendous opportunities to implement the latest commercial property management best practices.

Facilities management can often seem like a job full of competing demands. An integrated analytics platform can make that job manageable and transform the way your building functions.

Buildings IOT offers the technology, services, and strategies you need to institute commercial property management best practices. Contact our team of experts today.