How smart building features attract more tenants

Are you struggling to fill rental voids? Attracting commercial tenants can be tough, but it doesn’t have to be. Adding smart building features to your property can help fill the space with premium tenants and improve your bottom line.

As a commercial property owner or manager attracting and retaining tenants is critical for business success. Smart buildings are transforming the property industry with cutting-edge technology, automation, and intelligence. It’s one of the most effective ways to enhance your portfolio and stand out in a competitive market.

In this article, we’ll explain the features and benefits of smart buildings and provide examples from a few projects we’ve worked on.

Smart building definition

A smart building uses advanced technology to automate, control, optimise, and monitor various building systems and operations. The smart building ecosystem is complex and often requires specialist knowledge and expertise to manage and protect it. Working with smart building experts like ITVET can help you navigate the challenges and complexities of smart technology, and ensure your building runs flawlessly.

Smart building features & technologies

Here are the key elements of a smart building ecosystem:

IoT sensors and devices

The smart building ecosystem is made up of interconnected IoT sensors and devices that are embedded throughout the building. They’re constantly communicating with each other, sharing data and responding to your tenants’ needs in real-time.

Automation

A key feature of IoT is automation. IoT devices and sensors can automate various building systems such as heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, lighting and security.

Network

A robust network infrastructure is the backbone of a smart building. It acts as the central nervous system that provides the critical connections between devices, sensors and systems, allowing them to work seamlessly together.

Connectivity

Smart buildings rely heavily on reliable and secure connectivity. IoT devices and sensors need to connect to the internet so they can communicate and share data with each other in real time.

Data analytics

IoT sensors capture a large amount of data that’s analysed in real time via the cloud. The data is used for automation, but it also provides valuable insights into a building’s performance. This enables property managers to make informed decisions about energy usage, space allocation, occupant comfort and more.

Building management system

The building management system (BMS) is the brain of the smart building. It’s the overarching platform that controls and monitors all your building’s systems.

Smart building benefits

Energy efficiency

One of the key advantages of smart buildings is that they improve energy efficiency. IoT sensors allow you to focus energy usage on where and when it’s needed. For example, occupancy sensors can detect the presence of people to adjust lights, temperature and ventilation automatically. With sustainability now a priority for tenants this gives smart buildings a competitive advantage. It can help attract eco-conscious tenants who are often prepared to pay more for sustainable spaces, giving you stronger returns.

Cost savings

Improved energy efficiency translates into substantial operational cost savings for businesses. These savings can then be passed onto tenants in lower service charge costs. With energy costs spiralling energy-efficient smart buildings are a big draw for tenants.

Data-driven insights

IoT devices and sensors collect a vast amount of data that provides invaluable insights into space utilisation and tenant behaviour. This data enables better decision-making for optimising space layouts, services and amenities to better meet the needs of your tenants. This ensures you get the most out of your space and the tenant experience continually improves.

Space utilisation

Occupancy monitoring shows you how people are using each area of your building. This enables you to make data-driven decisions on optimising layouts, reallocating space, providing flexible workspaces and more. Effective space utilisation helps you to better meet the needs of your tenants and ensure maximum return from your smart building.

Clean spaces

Keeping large indoor spaces clean can be difficult. With smart buildings, cleaning becomes more focused, effective, and time-efficient. For instance, you can use smart building features to identify high-traffic areas that get dirty quickly so you can prioritise and focus on those. Maintaining a clean and tidy space creates a good first impression for potential new tenants and can improve tenant retention rates.

Real-time information

Smart buildings give tenants access to real-time information about the building and their workspace. For example, they can easily check meeting room availability and receive automated updates on maintenance schedules. This enhances employee efficiency and productivity, making smart buildings attractive to businesses, particularly larger ones that hire many people.

Proactive maintenance

Smart building features constantly monitor your devices, systems and infrastructure. This allows property managers to identify potential issues before they become a major problem. As a result, there are fewer disruptions, lower maintenance costs, and a smoother overall tenant experience.

Enhanced comfort

Another one of the main advantages of smart buildings is that they provide enhanced comfort. Through building automation, you can adjust features like lighting and temperature based on tenant preferences, creating a personalised and comfortable workspace for them. This can help ramp up their productivity and make the overall tenant experience more pleasant.

Enhanced tenant safety

Your primary concern should be the safety of your tenants. No one should ever come to harm using your facilities. Smart building features such as access control and CCTV enhance the security of your building to ensure the safety of your tenants and their belongings.

Improved tenant health and wellbeing

A smart building is a healthy building. Since 2020 our eyes have been opened to the reality of viruses and other illnesses that can easily spread between people. Occupancy monitoring can help with social distancing and controlling the number of people in an area to avoid overcrowding. Many companies actively seek workplaces that value employee wellbeing, including their physical and mental health. Smart building features enable you to meet their needs and stand out in a crowded market.

Smart building examples

One Heddon Street

One Heddon Street‘s strapline is ‘Work. Space. Redefined.’ They’ve used smart building features to enhance the building and make it an amazing workspace for its tenants. The smart features focus on comfort and wellbeing, ensuring workers have the perfect environment for productivity.  

The selling points include:

• 1GB of resilient WiFi – Tenants can easily access fast, reliable and secure internet from any area of the building.
• Thermal comfort – Tenants can control the temperature of wherever they’re sitting to suit their needs.
• Biodiversity – There’s a living wall, an indoor garden and trees are planted on each floor to create a relaxing atmosphere.
• Indoor air quality – The fresh air supply to the offices is 50% above the minimum recommended level.

City Hall

City Hall, previously known as The Crystal, holds accreditation for being one of the world’s greenest buildings. This stunning building is home to the Mayor of London, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority.

What makes City Hall stand out?

• 80% of its hot water is heated by solar energy and ground source heat pumps.
• 70% less CO² emissions compared to other offices in the UK.
• Tenants can easily control lighting, temperature and microphone volume – all from a tablet or phone.  

Why you should work with a specialist

Whether it’s a new build or a retrofit, any building can adopt smart building features. However, integrating them can be a complex process. We highly recommend you work with a specialist like ITVET. Our smart building consultancy team provides expert guidance and support for implementing and managing smart building technologies.

Here’s why you need a smart building specialist:

Integration and interoperability challenges

Interoperability allows the seamless exchange of communication and data between the different devices and systems. It’s the key to making your building truly ‘smart’. However, it’s one of the major challenges when integrating smart building features into a property. To ensure everything is integrated properly and working harmoniously you need an overarching IoT strategy.

At ITVET, our smart building consultants work closely with you to create an IoT strategy tailored to your property and business requirements. Your IoT strategy will drive your smart building project and ensure the development process is seamless and hassle-free.

Security and privacy concerns

The proliferation of IoT devices in smart buildings poses security and privacy concerns. Your IoT devices and network can potentially compromise your smart building through a wide range of vulnerabilities and risks. However, these can be mitigated with a robust cyber security strategy, ensuring the safety and privacy of your tenants.

At ITVET, we have dedicated smart building cyber security specialists who can assess, design and strengthen your defences. We offer multi-layered protection tailored to your specific requirements, ensuring the safety of your building, tenants and reputation.

Importance of expertise and support

The efficiency of a smart building relies on secure, reliable and resilient connectivity. If that goes down, the whole building goes down with it. Our team of smart building specialists understand the challenges and opportunities associated with smart buildings. With our expertise and industry-leading connectivity solutions, your smart building will run flawlessly around the clock.

Final words

Utilising smart building features is one of the most effective ways to attract commercial tenants and improve retention. Smart buildings can attract tenants by providing enhanced comfort, convenience and security. What’s more, smart buildings appeal to a more affluent demographic, enabling you to charge premium rents to boost your profits.

Unsure of how to get started? ITVET offers the technology and support you need to create a cutting-edge smart building. We work closely with you to identify your needs and explore your options. Together, we can make the most of your assets and deliver strong returns. Contact our team of experts to learn more about what we can do for you.