Utility submetering allows property owners and managers to allocate utility costs fairly among residents by measuring each unit's true consumption of water, gas and electricity.
Synergy Utility Billing is the leading expert in designing, deploying and maintaining custom multifamily submetering solutions. We provide a full-service experience, from initial consultation and system design to professional installation, meter reading, billing, collection, analytics and optimization. Most important, we take the hassle of submetering and utility billing away from you and your team. We make it easy to comply with state and local regulations and deliver a seamless experience for residents of your apartment buildings, condo complexes, HOA, mobile home parks, water district or multi-property portfolio.
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Our commitment to providing unparalleled service, highly effective utility system design and maximum cost recovery has helped us recover over 90% of utility costs for our clients.
Why Choose Utility Submetering?
Utility submetering has benefits for both your firm and your residents. Installing individual submeters is the most precise way to allocate gas, water and electric costs. This improves utility cost recovery (and NOI) by ensuring that residents are billed according to their actual usage, rather than a mathematical formula or guesswork. Residents are significantly more inclined to pay a utility bill that they perceive as accurate.
Another benefit of utility submetering is its reduction in water, gas and electric usage. Studies have shown that offering residents individually calculated bills drops overall utility consumption by as much as 35%. This reduces financial exposure and has a positive effect on the property’s carbon footprint. All of these factors lead to increased property valuations.
How to Start Submetering
Synergy makes it easy to implement utility submetering across your multifamily property investments. We begin with a holistic review of the current state of your utility infrastructure, with eyes on creating the most efficient and effective submetering system possible. After the solution is designed, we help choose the right equipment and work with our professional installation partners to deploy it correctly.
Once the equipment is in place, we read each submeter every month (either manually or via a network connection), bill residents according to their usage, and provide them with multiple payment options. Our resident service team is always available to help resolve billing inquiries and answer questions, so your team doesn’t have to.
Both your management team and residents have access to customized online portals for 24/7/365 access to account details, usage analytics, billing history and more.
New Construction & Existing Buildings
Utility submetering is suitable for both newly built multi-unit properties and existing construction.
With new construction, it is common (and beneficial) for a submetering specialist like Synergy to be involved in infrastructure design. This ensures that the system will be highly effective from Day 1. We can help install the submeters themselves, or provide expert counsel to the contractor or builder.
Existing water, gas and electric infrastructure can usually be retrofit with submeters. As an added benefit, this process creates an opportunity to closely analyze usage and eliminate waste. In some cases – such as extremely old buildings or unusual system setups – a ratio utility billing system (RUBS) solution may be a better fit.
Utility Submetering as a Resident Amenity
More and more multi-family property management groups are considering submetering a resident amenity. Utility submetering gives tenants enhanced control over their finances by tying billing to their precise electric, water and gas usage. Offering flexible payment options, a modern web portal and dedicated service team also improves the resident experience.
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When you partner with Synergy, you get unparalleled responsive service that improves NOI, improves property value and unlocks insights that legacy RBCs simply can’t match.