Utility Solutions

Natural Gas Submetering

Natural gas submetering allows multifamily owners, property managers and landlords to effectively recover utility costs by ensuring residents are billed only for their actual usage.

Synergy Utility Billing is a boutique submetering consulting, installation and billing firm. We design, deploy and maintain custom natural gas submetering solutions. These include both traditional utility submetering, with individual meters measuring each unit’s exact gas consumption, as well as RUBS billing, which distributes natural gas costs mathematically by unit occupancy, square footage, and numerous other factors. Our team has experience dealing with varying submetering regulations from coast to coast, making us ideally suited to manage natural gas billing for clients with multistate portfolios.

Why Use a Gas Submetering Company?

Natural gas submetering is extremely complex. From system design and submeter installation through meter reading, billing and collections, it’s not something property owners, managers or landlords should take on themselves. At Synergy, we offer decades of experience creating and maintaining natural gas submetering systems that increase NOI and offer residents greater control over their utility bills.

With Synergy, landlords can focus on their day-to-day operations without worrying about the intricacies of natural gas billing. Our team handles meter reading (either in person or via a network connection), individual billing, reporting and analytics. We offer flexible billing and payment options, a responsive helpdesk for landlord and resident questions, fast remittance and more.

How Gas Submetering Helps Residents

Natural gas submetering reduces utility costs for residents by allowing them to take control of their own consumption and costs. Without submetering in place, residents are often charged an unfair percentage of their building’s total natural gas consumption. Individually calculated utility bills divide the gas bill far more equitably, increasing utility cost recovery, keeping residents happier and improving tenant renewal rates. Additionally, top-tier submetering and utility billing companies offer premium features like online account access, credit card payments and paperless billing, giving residents an enhanced level of service.

Submetering has also been shown to reduce overall utility consumption by as much as 35%. This results in cost savings for both residents and landlords as well as a positive effect on the environment.

Gas Submetering vs. Ratio Utility Billing

A utility billing company like Synergy can determine individual gas bills in two ways: true submetering and ratio utility billing, or RUBS.

With submetering, individual meters are used to read each unit’s exact natural gas consumption. This is the most common choice for a new multifamily construction, but it is also possible to retrofit existing buildings with gas submeters.

RUBS billing does not require the use of individual submeters. RUBS divides overall costs by using a set formula, taking into account factors such as unit size, layout, number of occupants, number of bathrooms, common area deductions and more.

Is submetering or RUBS right for your building? Contact our experts to find out.

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It’s time to start working with a different kind of utility billing company. When you partner with Synergy, you get unparalleled responsive service that improves NOI, increases average tenant stay, improves property value and unlocks insights that legacy RBCs simply can’t match.