Energy benchmarking allows building owners and managers to quantify how much energy their buildings consume and how much they are spending on utilities to find areas of potential savings. This process is only valuable to owners if they have a consistent framework to determine which buildings in a multifamily real estate portfolio are operating efficiently. Bright Power believes that the most meaningful framework is to compare buildings to ones with similar energy and water consumption needs. For example, buildings that are structurally quite different or are in different climate regions would not be expected to require the same amount of energy to operate, and thus buildings should ideally only be compared to “peer” buildings to identify whether or not they are operating efficiently. Bright Power has recently updated its EnergyScoreCards building grades algorithm to more closely model the concept of a peer building and account for more granular regional differences in building characteristics and operation. This allows building owners to better identify opportunities for savings within their portfolios and target their resources towards those buildings with the greatest likelihood of improvement.