Energy Saving Tips: How Property Management Can Reduce Energy Bills

While the headlines may have been preoccupied with other news in recent weeks, the focus is now back to the rising cost of energy bills. As the government work on plans to help support the country, we look at the practical ways you can combat the rises.

As has been previously reported, household energy bills already increased by 54% in April and are set to increase by a further 80% in October. There are also reports of a further price rise in January. No matter where you live or how much you earn, everybody is looking to save money on gas and electric bills this winter. Even the Royal Family will see a hike in energy bills, with an estimated rise from £2.5 million to £4.5 million per year.

So what can you do as damage limitation? The answer for Bold & Reeves lies in efficient property management. With advanced technology, specialist knowledge and unique relationships with energy brokers, we can help clients reduce bills without limiting their quality of life at home.

Maximise energy efficiency with remote monitoring:

Remote monitoring is quite literally a way to monitor the energy consumption in your house, while you’re not there. We work with remote monitoring partners, like Infogrid, to install monitors on key equipment around our properties, such as pipes and boilers. This helps reduce energy usage in a number of ways.

On one level, it allows to identify what is and isn’t being used. For example, we might find that heaters are being used to heat rooms that aren’t ever occupied or a pool is being heated when nobody is using it. We can then adjust the systems to ensure that the heating is only activated at the appropriate times, thus saving on costs.

As well as this, we are also able to identify if there are any issues with equipment within a property. Remote monitoring allows us to analyse energy data, and any subsequent peaks and troughs. For example, if a pipe is leaking, we will be able to identify where this is happening in the system by the alerts we receive. This data can be accessed 24/7 in the Bold & Reeves Management System (BRMS) under the “Sensors” tab. Identifying and fixing these problems not only helps save energy costs in the short-term, but helps to reduce costs incurred by long-term damage.

Budget analysis: how much are you really spending on your property?

All our remote monitoring data and our property maintenance data (such as what was fixed, when and how much it cost) is fed into the BRMS in real-time. This data can be accessed in the “Cost Analysis” section, where all costings are broken down into various categories, such as reactive or planned maintenance.

Here, you can see the cost saved on the property over a long-term trajectory. For example, we might advise that an old boiler, which is perhaps an inefficient, dated model, be replaced with a new state-of-the-art boiler. You can then see how this affects the budgets of your property with fewer breakdowns and more efficient energy outputs. This is all part of our “spend to save” model.

Work with energy brokers to get the best deal for your property:

At Bold & Reeves, we work with a number of trusted partners to offer our clients the best competitive rates, whether that’s the people who fix your boiler or who provide your insurance.

As part of this service, we have unique relationships with trusted energy brokers. This means we can negotiate preferential rates for clients as part of their benefits of being with Bold & Reeves. What’s more, we can secure these rates for entire portfolios, so that when a client purchases a new individual property it can be included within this payment model.

To find out more about our services, please get in touch with Henry Browne at henry.browne@boldandreeves.co.uk