Lincoln Property Company Delivers Value to Tenants and Property Owners with Gridium

Gridium’s combination of software and services helps Lincoln keep tenant costs down and occupancy up

Lincoln Property Company, a global, full-service real estate firm, has a combined management and leasing portfolio of more than 510 million square feet, with over $20 billion in assets under management. Headquartered in Dallas, the firm is known for providing innovative solutions to owners, investors, lenders and occupiers.

“We’re dedicated to tackling the challenges of today’s dynamic market head-on. We help clients see around corners in a landscape that is ever-changing and our Property Management commitment remains constant: to deliver value to our clients and exceptional service to our tenants.”

Andrew Jones, Senior Vice President

Lincoln has led the way in redefining the real estate landscape in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with over 37 million square feet of space under management and over 10 million square feet of commercial space developed in the last 10 years.

Challenge

Keeping Tenant Costs Low

Property managers face a historically challenging leasing market. To navigate it successfully, Lincoln stays focused on keeping tenant costs, like electricity bills, as low as possible. That’s not always easy when taking over management of an asset. 

“Tenants monitor electrical costs, so when they see those costs going up year after year,  they may look for alternative buildings that have energy management strategies in place to keep those costs down.”

Kathleen Morgan, Assistant Property Manager

Detecting energy inefficiencies is difficult even for the most seasoned chief engineers, but the increased complexity of commercial building equipment has made costly inefficiencies much harder to find. 

Today’s buildings have every vintage of machines in them, from old controls with new equipment to new controls with old equipment. It has led to a knowledge gap for chief engineers: they must be able to work with their hands and understand rapidly changing programming logic for controllers. As if that isn’t enough, they’re being asked to learn how big pieces of building equipment affect energy costs, and keep that in mind while wading through constant BMS alerts and hot/cold calls.

Budgeting—which feeds into tenant lease agreements—has also become substantially more difficult in recent years, due largely to COVID-19 and energy price volatility. Aging U.S. grid infrastructure, the increase in renewable energy on the grid, and geopolitical instability have caused energy prices to swing wildly and rise more precipitously than anticipated. Meanwhile the rise of hybrid remote work schedules is changing occupancy and usage expectations for the CRE industry writ large. Together these can make predicting next year’s building’s energy spend very difficult without deep energy expertise. 

Inside 8111 Douglas, Lincoln’s new mixed-use development in Dallas, TX (Source: Lincoln Property Company)

Reporting

As a trusted property manager to some of the world’s largest REITs, Lincoln occasionally faces challenges that require both energy market expertise and high-touch service. When a publicly-traded REIT partnered with Lincoln to manage their nationwide portfolio, Lincoln had their work cut out for them. For Lincoln, this meant meeting rigorous ESG reporting requirements by gathering energy consumption data from buildings that hadn’t previously been collecting it. “When we got access to the Energy Star Portfolio Manager accounts for the buildings in 2023,” recalled Kathleen Morgan, Assistant Property Manager at Lincoln Dallas, “we discovered that we didn’t have full year’s data for at least 80% of them. The client needed 2023 and 2022 energy consumption.”

Lincoln didn’t just need that data within the year, they needed the data to be third-party verified to meet ESG reporting requirements. Training engineers to set up Energy Star Portfolio Manager takes time, which was in short supply with the onboarding of 14 new properties. Lincoln needed a hands-on partner who they could trust to collect accurate energy consumption data.

Approach

Keeping Tenant Costs Low

Lincoln’s Dallas team only had the Gridium platform running for a few months at their pilot site before deciding they needed it across their portfolio. Without the time to dig into property level details, Gridium enabled them to look at building performance from a portfolio level, figure out what the problem properties were, and direct a chief engineer to diagnose them. 

They used the platform multiple times per week to keep building operations in check, at both headquarters and on-site. During onboarding, a Gridium team member performed in-person building walk-throughs across the Dallas portfolio, creating relationships with chief engineers and explaining the impact of utility rates and equipment performance on costs. Armed with that information, chief engineers were taught how to use the Gridium platform to identify savings opportunities.

“Engineers often see the Gridium platform during onboarding and go ‘Oh, I didn’t know my building was running like that!’ You just don’t know what you don’t know.”

Kathleen Morgan, Assistant Property Manager 

“I have minimal time to actually go to the properties and see for myself how their systems work,” says Roy Smith, a Director of Engineering for Lincoln, who manages over 5 million square feet of property across 25 buildings in Texas, including over 30 chief engineers. “Gridium allows me to look at the raw data on how these buildings are run from a demand and consumption standpoint. Little tweaks mean a lot over time. The data helps my team understand the cause and effect of, for instance, optimizing start and stop times in our buildings.”

Inside 1900 Pearl in Dallas, TX (Source: Lincoln Property Company)

Overall, Gridium has encouraged a strong culture of operational efficiency among the Lincoln chief engineers. “I keep using Gridium to enlighten my operation engineers, and all the other team members are getting on board,” says Smith. “They know now that every Monday morning when I come into work, I’ve looked at the prior weeks’ operation in Gridium, and they’ll get a virtual ‘pat on the back’ from me whenever I see positive changes.”

“Each of our buildings has a unique consumption pattern,” says Jason Denges, a chief engineer at Lincoln. “Gridium helps us see where we may have hidden inefficiencies, like quick building start-ups or other unnecessary demand spikes, and take action to address them right away.”

When budgeting season rolls around, Lincoln’s property managers rely on Gridium to create reliable budgets in a fraction of the time. Lincoln has shifted from spending two hours per building creating a spreadsheet to estimate next year’s energy spend if occupancy goes up or down to using Gridium’s budgeting tool. “Gridium makes things much faster, and gives us third-party backing when sending budgets to our building owners,” said Morgan. 

Reporting

Tracking down two years of energy consumption data for the 14 buildings in their public REIT client’s portfolio was a huge undertaking. The Gridium team began by meeting one-on-one with every property, standing up the Gridium platform and building out custom tools to pull data from 11 different utilities’ meters or bills across the country. With the right tools in place, they were able to pull information that even property teams at the buildings didn’t have, including energy consumption data back to 2022.

1900 Pearl, a new Class AA high-rise tower in the Dallas Arts District (Source: Lincoln Property Company)

Results

Much of the early value Lincoln’s engineering team got from Gridium has been through schedule changing. With the Gridium platform the team discovered that close to 80% of the buildings in Dallas were not running per building lease schedules and made immediate adjustments. Staggering start times to decrease peak demand has also been huge for the team. These two no-cost changes alone lowered Lincoln’s Dallas portfolio-wide energy bills by more than the cost of the platform. 

Lincoln has seen results well past schedule changing and staggered start times. Gridium has gone onsite at multiple properties, performed audits and walkthroughs, and identified deeper energy efficiency savings opportunities for Lincoln. “We’ve seen tremendous value in partnering with Gridium as we strive to manage properties as efficiently as possible for both owners and tenants,” said Morgan.