Building Benchmark BC

Supporting property owners through a changing landscape

By participating in voluntary benchmarking and disclosure, you can ensure your voice is heard in the industry shift towards increased building performance.

Year 1 of Benchmark BC was a great success! Click below to see the results and read the report.

See the Results

Year 1 of Benchmark BC was a great success, showing the readiness of municipal and private sector owners to benchmark and disclose their performance. We exceeded our recruitment targets by doubling our number of partner jurisdictions and recruiting over 500 buildings… a total of almost 5 million square metres of gross floor area. Our participants include a wide range of property types under the ownership of everything from pension funds to small private owners to cities and non-profit housing agencies. To learn more about our Year 1 benchmarking results, please see our Annual Report here [PDF].

To see the results for yourself, and to dig into the data in visual format, please see the Building Benchmark BC Disclosure site.

What is building benchmarking and disclosure?

Energy benchmarking is the process of tracking and recording a building’s energy performance over time. It is based on the fundamental principle that building energy consumption must be measured before it can be managed. Performance data can help owners and managers to identify opportunities for operational efficiency improvements and retrofit projects.

Disclosure refers to the process of making benchmarking data accessible to a range of stakeholders, including local jurisdictions.

Building owners and managers

Valuable opportunity for property owners and managers:

Competitive insights

Gain insight into not just your own energy usage, but also how this compares to similar buildings

Capitalize on opportunity

Attract and retain tenants who value transparency and responsible building management

Gain awards

Receive recognition for your building’s performance or your efforts to increase its performance

Display leadership

Show the industry you are a leader engaged in changing the built landscape

Influence regulations

Influence the direction of potential future benchmarking and disclosure regulations

ESPM

Get help setting up ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager (ESPM) and syncing with utility providers

Communities

Do you represent a local government? Join us!

Robust dataset

Creation of a robust dataset of local building performance that can better quantify GHG emissions across the region

Incentivize intelligently

Knowing what themes exist in top performers, we can then incentivize impactful changes

Buildings will do better

Data suggests building owners who have information are more likely to retrofit to optimize

Support services

We get program support from OPEN, including an established technology backend, support in program design, and customer support for property owners

Build capacity

Building capacity among our staff to understand and support higher building performance

Work collaboratively

Working within a cohort of local governments working to achieve energy and emissions reductions in the built sector

Join in

Want to learn more?

Building Benchmark BC: Press Releases and News Articles.

Updates

Inspiration

Several European, Australian and American states and cities have been requiring building energy benchmarking and disclosure for years, and have had great success in helping property owners and tenants improve their energy efficiency.

A prime example, New York City’s Benchmarking Law mandates benchmarking and disclosure for all privately-owned properties 50,000 ft2 or greater. Between 2010 and 2015, the law helped cut energy use from over 4,200 benchmarked buildings by more than 10% and emissions by almost 14%. This initiative has helped underpin a massive policy shift leading to the City’s transformative Climate Mobilization Act.

In Canada, benchmarking is only now beginning to gain traction. While some provincial and local jurisdictions are starting to explore benchmarking and disclosure regulations, Ontario is the only province to mandate building energy data reporting and disclosure (as of late 2019).

Building Benchmarking BC