Sectors — Retail, Malls & Property
You pay for the whole building. You recover what you can prove.
A landlord settles one invoice for the main incomer and then has to divide it among tenants, common areas and their own account. Every unit that cannot be attributed is unrecovered income, and every attribution that cannot be evidenced is a dispute waiting to happen. Metering turns the division into arithmetic.
The division you already make every month
The main incomer equals tenant feeders plus common areas plus unaccounted consumption.
Two of those three terms can be recovered. The third is the one most landlords cannot put a figure on.
Where the main incomer actually goes
Every kilowatt-hour on your utility bill ends up in one of three places. Two of them can be recovered. The third is the one you are currently paying for without knowing its size.
Main incomer — the utility invoice
Tenant feeders
Recoverable
Consumption that belongs to a specific unit and can be recharged to that unit with a reading behind it.
Common areas
Recoverable through service charge
Lifts, pumps, car park and external lighting, security and mall HVAC. Legitimately shared — but only defensible as a service charge if it is measured rather than apportioned by assumption.
Unaccounted
Not recoverable
The remainder. Bypassed connections, a unit fed from the wrong board, a tenant fit-out wired into a landlord circuit, or plant nobody has identified. This is the landlord’s loss in full.
What measured apportionment changes for a tenant
Sub-metering is often introduced as a way to catch tenants. It works far better introduced as a way to stop overcharging the quiet ones.
Under an apportioned service charge, a small shop with a till and two lights subsidises a restaurant with cold rooms and extraction. The restaurant is not doing anything wrong; the allocation method is. Tenants generally understand this the moment it is put to them, and a landlord who can show a reading is in a materially stronger position at renewal than one who cannot.
The same visibility protects tenants from being billed for a common-area cost that has quietly grown, and protects you from carrying a cost that was never yours.
What you have on billing day
The point of the installation is what happens at the end of each month.
Read
Consumption per tenant feeder for the billing period, taken from the meter rather than reconstructed from an estimate or a previous month.
Allocate
Common-area consumption for the same period, ready to apportion on whatever basis your leases specify — floor area, unit count or an agreed formula.
Reconcile
Tenant total plus common area set against the utility invoice for the incomer. Whatever does not reconcile is the unaccounted figure, and it is now a number instead of a suspicion.
Evidence
When a tenant queries a charge, the interval data for their own feeder answers it — usually in one conversation, and usually in the tenant’s presence rather than by correspondence.
Common areas are where a landlord’s own savings live
Tenant consumption is recovered. Common-area consumption is either recovered imperfectly or absorbed. It is also the part of the building you alone control, which makes it the part where an efficiency measure translates directly into margin — and in malls and mixed-use property these loads run long after the last tenant has closed.
Second term of the division, expanded
Common areas
- Lifts and escalators
- Run-hours set against trading hours, and movement recorded after the last unit closes.
- Water pumping
- Booster and borehole pump cycling against the building’s actual draw — the measurement a leak or a failing float switch shows up in first.
- Car park and external lighting
- A fully schedulable load, frequently on a manual switch with no named owner, recorded hour by hour.
- Mall HVAC and ventilation
- Central cooling and car-park ventilation measured against trading hours rather than against a default schedule.
- Security and standby
- CCTV, access control, and the generator that carries the whole property when the supply drops.
Common-area subtotal
Recoverable through the service charge to the extent it can be evidenced. Absorbed by the landlord to the extent it cannot.
Two things the landlord owns that the meters price
The roof
An asset you already own, priced by the load underneath it
A mall is one of the better solar propositions in the country, because trading hours and generation hours are almost the same hours. But the array is worth what the daytime load under it can absorb, and that number belongs to the common-area meters and the tenant meters together — not to the annual bill.
The recovery question follows immediately. What the landlord self-consumes in common areas is a direct saving; what tenants draw is already recovered through their feeders. Until the two are separated, a business case is being written against a figure that belongs partly to somebody else.
Solar project developmentWhen someone else asks
A dated study
Service-charge reviews, a refurbishment, a sale or a refinancing all want a position on the building’s energy performance at a point in time, signed and referenced. That is a study, not a subscription.
A temporary measurement campaign across the incomer, the common-area boards and a representative sample of tenant supplies produces the record, and the report states what it was measured with and over what period.
Energy auditsFind out what your building is not recovering
An assessment traces the distribution from the main incomer outwards. It ends with three things you do not currently have.
- Where the boards stop matching the leases
- Each tenant feeder traced back to its board and set against your lease schedule, so a unit fed from the wrong circuit is found on site rather than argued about later.
- The metering points that close it
- Named per unit and per common-area board, with the meter tier chosen against the current rating of each circuit rather than against a package.
- What it will take
- The meter and sensor count, three current sensors to every three-phase meter, fixed before anything is quoted.
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