How to Prepare for Submeter Installation: 3 Essential Tips

Installing submeters and billing utilities back to residents based on their usage is a wise investment for many multifamily property owners. In this blog, we give you some tips to prepare your property and your team for submeter installation.

Submetering makes it easier for property owners to reliably recover utility costs each month, which in turn reduces costs and improves NOI and profitability. Once you’ve decided that you want to begin a submetering initiative, the next step is submeter installation.

While this may seem straightforward, the truth is no submetering project is ever cookie cutter. Every building and every utility infrastructure is different. To ensure success so you can reap the full benefits of a well-optimized submetering system, you need to properly prepare and plan for your submeter installation before work can begin.

Here are three essential tips to prepare your property for a successful submeter installation.

3 Essential Tips to Ensure Your Submeter Installation is Successful

Tip #1: Ensure Your Property is Suitable for Submeters

Not every building is suitable for submeters. Before deciding to install submeters, you need to look into whether or not submetering is even feasible on your property. This assessment involves the legal stipulations of submetering in your area, your building’s current utility infrastructure, your building’s operating budget and the market acceptance of utility billback programs. Let’s take a look at each of these in detail.

• Review local regulations: Many state and local governments have legislation on the books regarding utility billing and submetering. Before moving any further in your assessment, it’s critical to ensure submetering is legal for your property.
• Assess your building’s current utility infrastructure: The age, condition and general layout of your building may make submetering impossible or prohibitively expensive.
• Review your budget: Unlike the utility master meter, submeters are bought, paid for and owned by the property owner or management company. Ensure your budget is ready to absorb these up-front costs before moving forward with installation.
• Research the surrounding rental market: One last pre-installation check is to ensure that your property can remain competitive with a utility billback program.

Tip #2: Hire Experienced, Qualified Contractors

Once you’ve determined your property can be submetered, the next thing you need to do is to find a reputable submeter installer. Submetering installations are serious projects that shouldn’t be done without the help from a professional. Submeters require proper installation and setup to accurately measure utility usage. If installed improperly by a general contractor or tradesman, you risk billing your residents inaccurately. That means either billing residents too much for the utilities they used and angering them or not billing them enough and hurting your cost recovery. Verify the submeter installer is licensed, insured and has a good track record with similar multifamily submeter installation projects.

A qualified installer should be able to work with you throughout the entire submeter installation project, from planning to installation to maintenance throughout the lifecycle of your new submeters. They should be able to determine optimal points for the installation of the submeters and make recommendations on automatic or manual read meters, depending on your budget. Many submetering installers work exclusively with a single submetering hardware brand, but ideally, your installer shouldn’t be beholden to any submetering brand. This empowers them to recommend the right submeter models for your needs and system requirements, regardless of brand.

An experience submeter installer is critical if you have an older property. They will be able to draw on their expertise to work with the challenges and intricacies of your property, so you can get the best submetering system in place for your cost recovery goals.

Tip #3: Have a Utility Billing Plan in Place Before Installation

Lastly, it’s crucial to ensure you and your team have a utility billing plan in place, so you can start billing as soon as your submeters are installed and operational. While this all sounds well and good, many property owners and management teams soon run into two common problems when setting up a utility billing system–a lack of time and a lack of utility billing expertise.

Let’s unpack those two problems.

• Lack of time: Managing multifamily properties is a lot of work. Between collecting rent, booking showings, handling maintenance requests and all the other administrative work, you and your team likely have little time to manage utility billing in house.
• Lack of expertise: In its simplest form, multifamily utility billing involves reading a meter, generating a bill based on that reading and collecting payment from the resident. But it’s much more than that if you want to maximize your utility cost recovery. You need to know how to leverage your submetering system to find cost-saving opportunities, stay up to date on regulations and have the team and the processes in place to ensure you’re following best practices for utility billing like sending bills on time, providing useful customer service and accepting a wide variety of payments.

Conclusion: A Successful Submeter Installation Leads to a Successful Utility Billing System

Submeter installation is crucial to ensuring the success of your utility billing program moving forward. With proper installation, your submetering system can accurately measure utility usage for each unit, and when sourced by and installed by a certified installer, it will last for years, recovering previously unrecovered utility costs.

At the same time, submeter installation and utility billing moving forward can be a lot to manage, especially if your team is already stretched thin. That’s why many property owners and management groups turn to an expert utility billing provider. The right provider can work with your team to review the feasibility of submetering your multifamily property, source the right installer and ensure maximum cost recovery throughout the life of your utility billing system.

Are you planning to install submeters in your multifamily property? Get in touch with Synergy. Our experts are here to help ensure your project is successful.