An Exciting Time to be a Proptech Company
It’s an exciting time to be a proptech company, and we’ve noticed a real change in the customer mindset. Over the past year, we’ve seen multifamily owners move from “why should I…” to “how do I…,” and as more buildings become technology enabled, owners, managers, maintenance staff and residents all benefit. But, more on that in another post. In this post, we we’d like to talk about customer adoption and how we’re evolving to meet the needs of this rapidly growing market.
Our technology has tangible, significant, and demonstrable benefits in both building operations and the resident experience, and that’s really resonating for both customers and partners. Embue delivers hard numbers and great ROI for energy efficiency and energy cost savings, but another, even larger benefit that we’ll be talking more about in the coming year is that automation and predictive maintenance make multifamily staff more productive and efficient. For owners, this is a huge deal because hiring and retaining a quality maintenance staff is a challenge for buildings of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, Embue improves resident comfort and security, which is directly linked to retention and improved revenue.
Mason Place, a 127-unit affordable senior housing complex in downtown Boston is one project that serves as a great example of how an inefficient building benefited from becoming technology enabled. Embue was installed in February 2018 and is now delivering $23,000 annually (25%) in energy savings and giving the property manager unprecedented real-time visibility and control of the whole building, from central HVAC equipment down to the individual apartment. The apartments had outdated thermostats mounted directly on fan coil units, so temperature readings weren’t accurate and apartments were overheating and overcooling. Residents were opening windows as the only effective way to prevent extreme temperatures, and unfortunately, this compounded the problem by causing extremely dry conditions that were very unhealthy in winter. In the summer, the humidity was so high that moisture was sometimes condensing on the walls. You can see the case study here.
We also introduced our second generation solution, which delivered improvements in analytics, scalability and installation. In particular, our new installer app makes partners completely self-sufficient in the field and enables us to support rapid growth in 2019 by bringing on additional partners and expanding geographically.
Things are scaling rapidly on the sales side, too. We’re currently working on several exciting projects that you’ll be hearing about shortly, and we have proposals in the works that will bring Embue to even more buildings.
So stay tuned - 2019 is shaping up to be strong year.