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WiredScore's Case to Asset Owners: Justify Smart Buildings on the Whole Certification Premium, Not Single Features, plus What 300 Buildings Show Owners Deploying
At NexusCon 2025, Will Brouwer, group product manager at WiredScore, compared the case for smart buildings to the case for buying organic chicken. A farmer can't easily justify including outdoor access for chickens or hormone use as separate line items. What justifies all of it is the premium shoppers pay for the organic label, roughly 67% above conventional food. Take away the premium, and the business case for each underlying practice falls apart.
Smart buildings, Brouwer argued, work the same way. Most individual use cases, from occupancy counting to tenant air-quality controls, can't clear a business-case hurdle on their own. What clears it is the premium the market pays for a certified building as a whole. He pointed to the numbers owners actually price against: a Moody's study of ten years of New York leasing data that found a 2.7% annual rental premium for smart-certified buildings, and a Cushman & Wakefield analysis of ten years of London data that put the premium at 7.3%. That figure moves owners far more than the ROI on any single water-saving feature.
WiredScore's benchmarking data across its last 300 SmartScore-certified buildings shows where the spend is landing. Floor-by-floor energy monitoring is now standard in most certified buildings. What almost none of them do yet is translate energy, water, and waste into the carbon figures tenants increasingly ask for.
Two other shifts stood out for operators. Owners are quietly walking back occupant comfort controls: app-based tenant adjustments of temperature and lighting were common a few years ago, but low usage and better alternatives have pushed landlords toward centrally optimized environments that respond to occupancy and weather instead. And operational-technology cybersecurity, the least-deployed category WiredScore tracks, is now the fastest-rising, as owners start treating connected building systems as an attack surface worth defending.
For anyone driving the business case for more connected buildings, WiredScore suggests tying it to a certification. A single meter, sensor, or control retrofit may never pencil out on its own.
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At NexusCon 2025, Will Brouwer, group product manager at WiredScore, compared the case for smart buildings to the case for buying organic chicken. A farmer can't easily justify including outdoor access for chickens or hormone use as separate line items. What justifies all of it is the premium shoppers pay for the organic label, roughly 67% above conventional food. Take away the premium, and the business case for each underlying practice falls apart.
Smart buildings, Brouwer argued, work the same way. Most individual use cases, from occupancy counting to tenant air-quality controls, can't clear a business-case hurdle on their own. What clears it is the premium the market pays for a certified building as a whole. He pointed to the numbers owners actually price against: a Moody's study of ten years of New York leasing data that found a 2.7% annual rental premium for smart-certified buildings, and a Cushman & Wakefield analysis of ten years of London data that put the premium at 7.3%. That figure moves owners far more than the ROI on any single water-saving feature.
WiredScore's benchmarking data across its last 300 SmartScore-certified buildings shows where the spend is landing. Floor-by-floor energy monitoring is now standard in most certified buildings. What almost none of them do yet is translate energy, water, and waste into the carbon figures tenants increasingly ask for.
Two other shifts stood out for operators. Owners are quietly walking back occupant comfort controls: app-based tenant adjustments of temperature and lighting were common a few years ago, but low usage and better alternatives have pushed landlords toward centrally optimized environments that respond to occupancy and weather instead. And operational-technology cybersecurity, the least-deployed category WiredScore tracks, is now the fastest-rising, as owners start treating connected building systems as an attack surface worth defending.
For anyone driving the business case for more connected buildings, WiredScore suggests tying it to a certification. A single meter, sensor, or control retrofit may never pencil out on its own.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.