Everybody recognises that the built environment, from office towers to hotels, hospitals to retail malls, needs to get smarter. The push for greater energy efficiency, the need for greater insight into user needs (and the flexibility to meet them), the likelihood of growing regulation and the need for live operational insights, they all point to the need for buildings with better digital integration. 

The status quo will be familiar to most developers, operators and tenants: a myriad of disconnected building systems, using proprietary data formats, with limited ability to connect them once the building is complete. Data is generated everywhere, but is hidden or disconnected from other sources; it’s a wealth of information that never becomes ‘intelligence’. 

A few new buildings are demonstrating how they can be both sustainable and digital to the core, achieving incredible efficiency ratings and offering digital twin levels of control. But we need to bring the same degree of control to the millions of existing buildings. This is why we designed our own, unified building data platform, to bring data integration to any building and drive a more sustainable built environment for all. 

Physical, human, digital

We have developed our own digital service to overcome the ‘my building is a mysterious black box’ problem. Our property insights process unifies all the performance data produced by the building’s many systems, helping you to fully understand the building for the first time. As a service it combines deep domain expertise in the structure, engineering of buildings with powerful data analytics, to produce a digital tool is tailored to you. 

The tool, and accompanying service, can be used with any building. We begin with an expert assessment, before creating a working data model of the asset. We then bring together the entire range of your building’s systems into a single cloud-based model. 

Arup's new Melbourne office
In the last year we’ve seen major corporates from banks to co-working spaces, rethink how best to use their spaces. Again, data is key. Our data service provides fine-grained intelligence on how different areas of your asset are being used.

Explore the benefits

The property insight process comprises a single dashboard, offering many different insights and advantages: 

  1. 1

    Manage every system

    A high performance building brings together many costly systems. In a typical office building there will be hundreds of meters for each tenant and it’s often hard to efficiently read the energy use for the building as a whole. Tenants increasingly want insights into the running costs of the floors they take in a building, and owners need to be able to provide the data in useful ways.

  2. 2

    Report real progress

    The growing climate change emergency is providing new challenges to the real estate sector. You need to report on regulatory compliance and understand related future risks. Part of real estate investors’ due diligence now includes a GRESB assessment of a building’s future ability to meet these demands. Our building data service gets you ready for new rating systems like NABERS which assesses energy efficiency, water usage, waste management and indoor environment quality - it makes your data easy to use and learn from.

  3. 3

    Adapt to new uses

    The pandemic has demonstrated the vital need for future flexibility in real estate. Owners need to be able to model alternative uses, adapt a space’s purpose or function, or offer new features like air quality or occupancy monitoring, if they’re to retain their appeal to investors and leaseholders alike. Interoperable data is at the heart of how nimble service adaptation is possible. Without it a building presents too many unchangeable liabilities and costs. With future pandemics a distinct possibility, the time to improve your level of insight and control is now.

  4. 4

    Learn from users

    Responding to changing tenant needs and behaviours is another priority for owners and developers. In the last year we’ve seen major corporates from banks to co-working spaces, rethink how best to use their spaces. Again, data is key. Our data service provides fine-grained intelligence on how different areas of your asset are being used, from occupancy levels to energy and resource use, patterns can be discerned and used to develop new services, layouts and designs that keep your building competitive.

Invest in the future

Getting your data aligned and interconnected is the first, vital step in developing a building or asset that you can learn from. It brings new levels of insight and control, enabling an intelligence-led approach to building management. In an era of increasing reporting, service expectations and competition, there’s never been a better time to bring your estate into the bright light of the digital realm.