AUSTIN, Texas, March 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Bractlet, a leading smart building software company, launches updates to its existing Intelligence Platform, the only end-to-end software solution for commercial real estate owners. With this enhancement, the platform’s Benchmark™ product will now streamline data aggregation for submission to LEED, GRESB, and Energy Star for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting. Benchmark, one of the company’s three-tiered solutions, digitally collects, processes, and stores utility and weather data for forecasting utility costs. Benchmark’s added features launch the same week as GRESB opens its portal for assessment reporting on April 1.

The Intelligence Platform is the first and only suite of solutions designed to accommodate the needs of owners and their property team across commercial real estate’s different asset types (industrial, multifamily, office and retail). Bractlet’s tiered product offering of Benchmark, Analytics, and Simulation allows for building owners to match the product need with the investment strategy of the building so they can holistically benchmark their portfolio’s performance and be given a roadmap for improvement in one platform.

“Fund managers and investors are committing to make existing and future portfolio investments carbon neutral,” says Dan Winters, Head of Americas for GRESB. “We will continue to see more commercial properties adhere to higher standards of decarbonization, and Bractlet’s effort to modernize the industry with its cutting technology for identifying and evaluating opportunities to upgrade buildings in the most capital-efficient manner is an important first step.”

“Companies around the world are asking more from their facilities. Portfolio-wide strategies are now guided by goals for occupant health and aggressive emissions reduction targets,” says Chris Pyke, Senior Vice President at Arc Skoru Inc. “Integration with Bractlet provides new technology capabilities to support these objectives with high-quality data and advanced tools to guide performance improvements.”

With increased pressure from investors, tenants, and municipalities, the commercial real estate market still lags in ESG standards due to confusion, inconsistency, and outdated methods of reporting:

• Owners/Operators: Owners stand at a crossroad. They must invest to improve a building’s tenant experience (amenities, services and well-being) and efficiency to be competitive in the market while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint.
• Property Managers: Traditional methods of manual bill collection are time-consuming and error-prone. Property managers need automated tools to analyze a building’s energy consumption and other utilities, which free up time for taking action to improve a building’s sustainability and ensure optimal ESG reporting.
• Investors – The world’s largest and most influential investors have stated they will only invest capital into companies and assets with low or net-zero carbon performance moving forward. However, the industry is handicapped. Research by Global State Street Advisors has found the key barrier for institutional investors from increasing their adoption of ESG is due to the consistency of data across providers, and the lack of ESG data in some areas of the market.
• Tenants – Tenants are becoming increasingly more critical of the wellness and carbon footprint of the buildings they lease from owners. As companies grow more comfortable with a work from home model and cut unnecessary costs to preserve their financial performance, owners cannot afford to lose existing and prospective tenants by not offering the most healthy, productive, and sustainable work environments.
• Government: U.S. municipal governments, led by organizations such as Climate Mayors, have enacted ordinances to target commercial real estate with near-term carbon emission reduction requirements. New York City and Los Angeles have led the way and other large cities across the country are following suit.

“The desire for sustainability already exists from top to bottom. Our job is to mitigate the barriers to entry,” says Matthew Lynch, Bractlet co-founder and chief product officer. “It is becoming increasingly difficult for teams to stay up-to-date and ensure accuracy when managing required data and information for ESG reporting.  The Bractlet Benchmark solution is designed to provide the highest quality assurance of data collected and to address concerns of errors and inconsistencies in ESG reporting.”

Last year, Bractlet announced it would separate its Intelligence Platform into a three-tier solution in order for building owners to see immediate business benefits and then upgrade over time to higher levels of analysis and richer feature sets.

“On average, our customers see a full return on their investment in savings within a year of adopting any one of our solutions,” says Lynch. “The higher the tier, the greater the savings; however, owners and operators have different needs for different assets, and we provide an accommodating solution for each.”

Bractlet is currently offering risk-free trials of its Bractlet Intelligence Platform to qualified customers. Contact info@bractlet.com for more information. Find more information on Bractlet’s Intelligence Platform™ here.

About Bractlet

Based in Austin, Texas, Bractlet is a leading smart building software company that analyzes office buildings holistically and provides owners with tailored, actionable solutions to enhance building performance, reduce energy use and operating costs, and streamline related financial and ESG reporting. Leveraging building design and utilization information with real-time building automation system (BAS), equipment electrical consumption and weather data, Bractlet creates a virtual model of each building it analyzes, simulating the building’s performance and energy use to help determine the ROI of system optimizations and capital improvements.  Bractlet’s software has been used to evaluate more than 100 buildings encompassing over 30 million square feet of commercial office space with leading operators that include KBS, Invesco, Lionstone, and Nuveen.