QuadReal Property Group is a global real estate investment, operating and development company headquartered in Vancouver. Their $27.4 billion real estate portfolio spans 23 global cities across 17 countries. QuadReal was established to manage the real estate program of British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), one of Canada’s largest asset managers with a $145.6 billion portfolio.

The Smart Building Data Challenge

Following the COVID-19 quarantine, safeguarding the health and safety of people heading back to work has become top of mind for the commercial real estate sector. Cleaning standards must be re-defined, effective physical distancing measures must be enforced, and optimal indoor air quality is crucial to provide peace of mind to facility-wide tenants.

QuadReal realized a combination of innovative IoT sensors measuring occupancy, consumables, and indoor environmental quality could help ensure this productive return-to-work; however, they also needed a platform to manage this massive influx of disparate building data.

Simplifying Complex Data Integration

With PremiseHQ’s GroundFloor^TM platform, QuadReal found an efficient and effective way to manage data from over 2000 IoT sensors across 43 buildings and eight cities through a single glass pane.

With GroundFloor’s no-code approach to data integration, QuadReal was able to collect data from each sensor, intelligently and automatically define relevant relationships between each data type and setup up automated alerts and workflows all within minutes. QuadReal could also overlay all of this data on top of floor plans for a clear and consolidated view of the parameters to be controlled.

Occupancy Detection

Data from radar-based occupancy sensors are captured in GroundFloor and track the average number of people per floor and the occupancy rate of each floor. QuadReal then uses this data to identify over-utilized and under-utilized zones to control base building and zone-level traffic better, reduce energy usage, optimize space and alert security if there is an intrusion after hours.

Smart Cleaning

Consumable monitoring sensors provide QuadReal with real-time data on cleaning supply levels for effective inventory management and timely replenishment. GroundFloor also fuses this data with occupancy data to empower smart cleaning schedules.

IEQ Monitoring

Data from indoor environmental quality sensors, such as temperature, lighting and air quality are collected and analyzed to ensure an optimal and healthy indoor environment. Real-time alerts are sent to facility managers when set parameters surpass desired thresholds.

The Results

With GroundFloor, QuadReal could instantly connect, unify and act on numerous critical data sets to enable data-driven decision-making across multiple properties for improved efficiencies and significant cost savings.

• Reduced time to deployment from 12-18 months to 6 months
• Reduced the need for FTE engineers from 2 to zero
• Reduced incremental deployment costs of new use cases to zero
• Saved $14,500 in energy costs per floor annually
• Reduced cleaner labour by 20%
• Reduced supply wastage by 35%

PremiseHQ was instrumental in enabling Quadreal’s IoT data pipeline strategy to deploy thousands of sensors across our commercial portfolio. We leveraged this infrastructure to deploy multiple use cases, analytics and data integration with other building systems to optimize our technology investments.