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There have been many contributors to climate change, but buildings are amongst the main culprits. The commercial real estate industry is a significant contributor, accounting for 40% of global carbon emissions, and the built environment of the top 100 world cities represents a staggering 85% of total emissions. Buildings are no doubt living and breathing entities, so care and expertise are required in the management of their internal systems. We are all fighting climate change and like so many aspects of our modern world, the commercial real estate industry needs to get smarter to fight the good fight.
“If we start with the narrative that 80% of all buildings that will be standing in 2050 are already operating, then we need to transform our thinking and decarbonate all our buildings now,” says Casey Witkowicz, President and CEO of RYCOM, a national technology-enabled services company decarbonating Canada’s real estate-built environments. “Re-designing a successful industry like real estate will involve all stakeholders having the will to accept that climate change is real and represents an extinction level threat. Stakeholders must all be aligned with the same purpose which is to keep real estate successful and make it carbon free. There is scientific evidence showing we are not doing enough and results prove we do not have to tradeoff climate change for profitability.”
RYCOM enables organizations, building owners, third party property managers and developers to effectively use smart technologies to digitally transform real estate assets into smart buildings that engage the people inside them and the communities surrounding them while increasing asset value and profitability. It is revolutionizing the way the real estate industry approaches environmental sustainability, operations, health, safety and the overall tenant experience. From its six offices in Canada it works with such leading developers as KingSett Capital, Hudson Pacific Properties, and GWLRA as well as companies such as First Capital, Triovest, Microsoft, Manulife, and Bell, as well as the Government of Canada.
Its first exposure to the real estate industry was more than twenty years ago when it was working with Cadillac-Fairview and Bell to bring value added services to commercial and retail tenants. What RYCOM found surprised them.
“We noticed how many independent systems and controls were in a single building yet expected to run harmoniously as one,” recalls Witkowicz. “We also discovered how much data the building generated and how it was not used, and how manual everything was and how under-tooled the property teams were to run maintenance and respond to issues. It seemed like the tenant was the alert system.”
RYCOM then went to work as it has in so many other industries where they had helped deploy technology-based solutions to upgrade operations, productivity, profitability, capabilities, automate mundane processes and in many cases improve or create an enhanced customer experience.
“We felt that the evolution of technology that would be best suited for commercial real estate was where we started to lay the foundation and investments to build data-driven smart platforms to address the inefficiencies we found,” says Witkowicz. “With the benefits of data driven platforms in making buildings smarter, you can solve problems that become apparent and critical in the future like climate change.”
‘Smart Buildings’ has become a common phrase and there are many benefits to developers and building owners. “A smart building is a building that uses its generated data to integrate its operations in real time,” says Witkowicz. “Creating a smart building provides all stakeholders with a platform-based tool set to quickly deal with customer needs and operating issues such as tracking and reporting obligations, building emissions and energy consumption. Smart buildings connected via a smart platform provides overall portfolio performance and metrics to guide management on areas of improvements.”
RYCOM is using technology to increase productivity using data science based upon environmental facts. The environmental impact buildings have on their communities and populations is evident – and visual. Looking at the downtown Toronto skyline on any bitterly cold winter morning and seeing the emissions rising high in the air, it’s hard not to think of the City of London’s smokestacks during the Industrial Age.
“Buildings are the centre of all cities, communities and neighbourhoods and are vital to their future,” says Witkowicz. “A buildings’ performance in its operating and emissions footprint is a building block toward bettering those cities. The emission of a building speaks to the wellbeing and health of the occupants of the building, the city, community and neighbourhood the building resides in.”
In digitally retrofitting a building, RYCOM uses three important components: HIVE Edge Device, HIVE Cloud and HIVE people. HIVE Edge connects all building systems and data sources, imports that regularly into RYCOM’s HIVE Cloud where HIVE people from RYCOM’s data intelligence team and the customer work together to act on the operating and performance outputs to optimize the building performance.
Change is difficult no matter what industry and RYCOM says owners and property managers were a challenging sell but that has changed over the last decade. They also report that architects, new construction and developers are coming around in recognizing that technology and data are new and valuable building blocks of next generation ‘Smart Cities’.
Two examples of commercial properties in the GTA who have incorporated RYCOM’s smart building technology are the well-known 2 Bloor West at Cumberland Terrace, which opened in 1972, and the relatively new 1, 2 and 8 Progolis owned by HOOPP Realty Inc. and located at Mississauga Gateway Centre. RYCOM worked with both properties to increase efficiencies, lower operating costs and address their environmental responsibilities.
“Change is not easy as we would all prefer to choose the timing of our change rather than have it forced upon us like the pandemic,” observes Witkowicz. “The time is now to transform a successful real estate industry into a carbon free, more profitable sector and even bigger economic and community builder.”
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