Benchmarked: A Case Study from MATAN Companies

Benchmarked, an energy blog series, examines local businesses who have used EPA’s Portfolio Manager to track energy use.     Company: MATAN Companies Benchmarked Property Name: Milestone Business Park, 12420 Milestone Center Drive, Germantown, MD 20876 Name and Title: Arthur Andreassi, Director of Property Management How many buildings does your company manage? 60 What kinds of building uses are in your buildings? MATAN Companies’ buildings include: Office, Laboratory, Flex space, Mixed Use, and Warehouse When did your company begin benchmarking? 2012     Why did you begin benchmarking? Benchmarking is a natural progression of our existing commitment to maximizing operating efficiencies and market value for our buildings. It is complementary to the commitment we have to providing our occupants with quality environments in which to live and work. Who has done (in the past) and does (if different now) your benchmarking in Portfolio Manager? Recurrent, LLC, has been, and continues to be, our contractor for all building engineering and energy performance tasks.     How has benchmarking your energy use changed the way you manage your portfolio? What do you do now that you did not do before? Benchmarking really opened our eyes to the potential variances in energy performance from building to building within our portfolio. Although 12420 Milestone’s ENERGY STAR score has hovered around 90 for the past few years, making it a market leader, other similar-use buildings of similar vintage have not fared nearly as well. We’re already hard at work discovering what makes our best performers stand out, capturing the operations practices that led them there, and deploying those practices to the rest of our portfolio.     What building’s energy performance are you most proud of, and why? I would have to say the 12420 Milestone building, as we have maintained the “market leader” in energy performance status and have incorporated best practices from that model towards the rest of our portfolio. What advice would you give for anyone benchmarking for the first time? Take it seriously and treat it as a learning opportunity. We initially believed all our buildings were performing well because their energy costs were not escalating year-over-year. Now we realize we can lower our costs going forward substantially, in a financially attractive way, improving our competitive position in the market.