“But every building is a snowflake” [Marketplace #5]

Hey friends, 

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. Systems, vendors, managers, technicians, economics, utility rates, and ownership structures change from building to building. Every snowflake is different, they say, and so is every building. 

Even within portfolios with one owner, scaling smart building technology is actually a lot rarer than we make it out to be. In our interviews with buyers, we’ve heard about: 

• Portfolios where they’ve done something in one building but don’t have the funding to scale it up 
• Portfolios where, by policy or process, technology is a site-level buying decision, so the vendor needs to go one by one 
• Portfolios that want to give site teams and users the choice—because they’re the ones that have to live with it 
• Portfolios where each asset is a different type (office, shopping mall, etc), and therefore needs different technology 
• Portfolios where individual assets are owned by different funds or different LLC

Despite this diversity across the portfolio, I’ve noticed that buyers can fall into a trap. They can use complexity as an excuse to neglect basic smart building program decisions. They can wave their hands in the air saying it’s too complex to get strategic. It’s easier to sprinkle pilots around and hope something good happens. 

Portfolio-wide smart buildings program managers must create the smart building strategy, even if the finer details are determined at the site level. The portfolio team needs to do the work to say: 

• This is why smart building technology is important to our business 
• These are the use cases that we’ve determined move the needle for our business or our shareholders’ businesses 
• These are the categories of technology we’ll use to enable those use cases
• These are the approved vendors that we’ve vetted to enable those use cases 
• These are our standards for cybersecurity, interoperability, and data modeling to enable those use cases

The site teams can then do projects that meet the standards, pick the use cases that make sense to them, and select from the pre-approved vendors. 

In very few portfolios has this program-level work been done today, but it’s vital for the “scale” we’re all working towards.

Does this resonate?

Buyers, we’re happy to help you get started on this work. 

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Until next week, 
—James Dice, Founder and CEO, Nexus Labs