Third-Party Benchmarking Data Verification How-to-Guide

Building drawings give verifiers useful information, like knowing the actual gross floor area (or GFA) of the property and a supporting source for that piece of information. GFA includes all building spaces within the envelope of the building, not just leased square footage, or apartment square footage, or any other subdivision of square footage. Architectural drawings normally have this information.

Drawings are also a useful starting point for helping verifiers determine what building square footage is used for what function. For example: an office building has areas that are occupied continually and other areas that are only occupied 50 hours a week. Portfolio Manager requires those spaces to be benchmarked separately within the Portfolio Manager entry for the building. Drawings help verifiers determine what GFA should be associated with those spaces.

• Alternatives to drawings. Sometimes a full set of building drawings aren’t available—maybe they were lost, destroyed, weren’t handed over during a transition, or any other reason. In those cases, there might be other documentation like property surveys, plats, or BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association International) calcs that can be used to substantiate GFA. Note that tax record GFA cannot be used, though, and that documentation likely can’t be used by the verifier to determine what building square footage is used for what function.

As noted above, good building drawings give the verifier space use breakdowns and let the owner easily work with the verifier to help them understand how spaces inside the building are used. If space use breakdowns aren’t obvious from the drawings, the verifier will need documentation from the owner helping delineate what spaces are used for what function.

A couple of principles apply to space use breakdowns:

• Common areas get attributed to the main space use type of the building. That is: if a property is primarily residential, an owner doesn’t need to figure out how much square footage is associated with hallways or common areas and treat those differently—for Portfolio Manager purposes, it’s all residential area.
• Similar spaces get aggregated together. This is best illustrated with an office. Let’s say this office building has four tenants: two tenants are in 45 hours a week, one tenant is in 48 hours a week, and the last tenant is in 60 hours a week. Using EPA’s guidance, the verifier would check to see if the first three offices are grouped together as a single property use and the fourth office is listed as a separate property use. Why is that? Offices get grouped together if their hours of operation are within 10% of each other.

For space characteristics, you can see here to learn about the sorts of information needed in Portfolio Manager. Some of this information may already be in other documentation (e.g., maybe an architectural cover page tells the verifier the number of bedrooms at a building), but this will generally require some amount of supplemental documentation from the owner.

This could be something like a rent roll in the case of multifamily properties or recent survey data on workers and computers for offices. Note that specifically for offices, the verifier will want to know the average number of people currently going to the building, not the number of people the building was designed to operate at peak occupancy.

To determine if the energy reported in Portfolio Manager is correct, the verifier needs to know two things: onsite utility meters and the energy attributed to those meters. Owners may need to work with their benchmarking providers to provide this information. This information falls into two general categories:

• Onsite utility meters. Verifiers need to match the utility meters in Portfolio Manager to the physical meters onsite. This is most easily accomplished by the owner’s staff collecting and providing meter photos to the verifier that clearly show the meter number and either providing:
  • Copies of utility bills, especially for commercial buildings that only have a few meters, or
  • Copies of aggregate meter lists, which are helpful for residential buildings that have a lot of meters. Aggregate meters are virtual summations of a lot of meters onsite (think of a residential building with 200 apartments; the aggregate meter would sum those 200 apartments plus any common-area meters).
• Confirming energy usage associated with meters. With bill copies and buildings with comparatively few meters, this is easy: the verifier looks to make sure that the energy used as shown on the utility bill matches the energy recorded in Portfolio Manager.

With aggregate meters, the verifier would look at provided documentation, trying to answer questions like “How many meters does the benchmarking provider show are at the site?” “Did the local utility provide the correct meters in response to the benchmarking provider’s ask?” and “Does this meter quantity make sense based on other supporting building information?” With aggregate meters, the number of meters will generally equal something close to “number of tenants + number of common meters,” but it isn’t always this straightforward. It’s the verifier’s job to nail this down.

Verifiers should be able to walk owners through this process if it’s unfamiliar to them. If the owner doesn’t have access, the owner should loop their benchmarking provider into the verification effort.

If a building doesn’t have good supporting data—maybe architectural drawings have been lost to the sands of time or nobody knows what meters are at a property—this isn’t the end of the world. It simply means the verifier will need more time and will initiate the Optional Task 2 to help in that effort. Some examples for when Optional Task 2 is initiated include:

• Unclear or contradictory documentation. Maybe the Portfolio Manager entry for a building says it’s 28,000 square feet but tax data says the building is 84,000 square feet. In this case, the verifier may need to do additional work to determine the actual building square footage. This might mean the verifier needs to perform takeoffs of drawings to identify the area(s) of a building that are currently included but should be excluded, like balconies. This sort of work isn’t included in the base scope but would be covered under Optional Task 2.
• Missing documentation. For example, if a property doesn’t have records of what portions of the buildings are used for what use type or if an aggregate meter list isn’t available, the verifier may need to be more directly involved in pulling this documentation together. The base scope assumes that all necessary documentation will be provided, and Optional Task 2 would be triggered if the verifier needs to collect this documentation.

Simple corrections to things like occupied hours, number of bedrooms, or other basic space use information that can be identified and implemented with the provided documentation won’t necessitate Optional Tasks. Optional Tasks get triggered when the verifier needs to figure out something larger that isn’t clearly evident in documentation.

Bringing someone onsite can be a time-intensive effort. This SOW assumes that won’t be necessary in most cases, but there might be times where the verifier may need to be onsite to confirm various building characteristics that can’t be confirmed remotely. An example is if a building has undergone a renovation that wasn’t well documented.

Generally, Optional Task 3 is needed if an owner/staff doesn’t have capacity to answer the verifier’s questions. Since the verifier is the one responsible for verification, it makes sense for the verifier to then get access to the building to answer their questions directly through observation and discussion with the onsite engineer or maintenance tech. Onsite staff may be needed to escort the verifier in this effort, and as a bonus the verifier might be able to explain to onsite staff what they’re looking for and streamline the process. This could help at other buildings, potentially reducing the verification effort for those buildings.

This is designed mostly for owners/staff that don’t have capacity to fully manage the verification process. Since the verifier would be collecting corrected data, the verifier could also change the Portfolio Manager entry directly. Ideally the owner or benchmarking provider would be making these changes, but admittedly not everybody has time for this. It is critical to note that the building owner is responsible for the Energy Star Portfolio Manager entry for the property, benchmarking, and data verification submission so any updates must be reviewed and accepted by the building owner.

Here are some examples of how your data might not be accurate for your building that will be corrected during this process:

• A garden-style multifamily property consisting of 10 buildings was originally benchmarked as a single facility at 200,000 square feet. However, each building is fully separately metered; this means for purposes of benchmarking, this property should actually be 10 different Portfolio Manager entries at 20,000 square feet per building, which has a drastic impact on when the building is subject to BEPS.
• A multifamily property was receiving aggregate meter from Pepco for the meters at its property and, as it happens, also the property next door. Resolving the aggregate meter data issues increased the ENERGY STAR rating for the property by over 40 points.
• An office building successfully reported leased square footage but didn’t report either common areas or the underground parking garage. Adding this square footage to the Portfolio Manager effectively decreased the site EUI and increased the ENERGY STAR score for the property.