Smarter buildings, without the fluff.

The Empire State Building is perhaps the most famous building in the world. Most in our industry don’t realize it’s also a great decarbonization and smart buildings case study. In fact, the team at Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) goes out of its way to share lessons learned with the rest of the industry to follow in their footsteps.

The Nexus Pro community manager, Eric Larsen, posed a compelling prompt to our 600-member community: “Many of us agree that “Use Cases” are the building blocks of a Smart Building. However, I haven’t heard a single, significant, concise definition. How can that be if they’re so important?!”

When I heard that 2 facilities staff members are responsible for 300 retail stores and 20 distribution centers, it blew my mind. I can barely remember to change the filter in my house’s furnace, let alone manage thousands of rooftop units distributed across the country.

The filterable Nexus Labs content library on our website tells me that since 2020, we’ve published 21 podcasts, 16 newsletters, and 10 members-only events on the independent data layer, building operating systems, digital twins, or single “pains” of glass. What do all these buzzwords topics have in common? They’re all used to describe the technologies at the data layer of the smart buildings stack. They’re all used to bring data from multiple silos together so it can be leveraged in software applications for better outcomes. 

We have a funny saying in our industry: “Every building is a snowflake”. Have you heard it? It’s used to describe the complexity of scaling smart building technology.

Last week, we summarized the ‘Category First’ buyer—the ones who start the buying process by assessing an entire category of technology vendors. Only after validating that the category moves the needle do they engage the marketplace in a serious way.