Finding the Needle in the Data Haystack: The Implications of a Data-Driven Built Environment

Within the green building industry, there is an increasing focus on policy, standards, and interoperability of building data. Municipalities are requiring energy data disclosure to reduce GHG emissions, real estate companies are looking for performance data to refine building valuation, underwriters are looking past net operating income to accounting for the triple bottom line, tenants are looking to improve employee satisfaction and measure their achievement of sustainability goals, NREL is developing a building data taxonomy, and the USGBC is working to simplify the certification and ongoing monitoring of buildings.

The result is a virtual tsunami of data that without the proper tools, standards, and analytics, can overwhelm potential users, and may frustrate and obscure the market transformation opportunities created by the data’s availability.

Our intent is to look at the potential data pool for the entire industry. From building operations to real estate finance – and draw out the value of different data sets in order to help organize data acquisition for greater utility, clarity in the industry, and for the conceptualization of business models that will support market innovation.

The first event in this effort is this discussion, which will outline the state of the industry. The panelists will explore both of the larger move towards data analytics and the current state of data utilization in the real estate industry. We will discuss variations due to building type, the use of environmental data, and municipal efforts to benchmark buildings. We will also take a broader perspective that will present how data analytics is transforming medical research, consumer products, advertising, and other industries in order to inspire a discussion on how this could translate to various sectors of the real estate industry.

This two-hour session on February 16th will be a preparatory event for a full-day conference on Data Analytics in the Built Environment that will be held on April 30th.