Carbon Lighthouse, an energy services company focused on revenue-generating ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) solutions for commercial real estate (CRE), released its new Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) solution, which shows real-time IAQ metrics for a building through a simple, occupant-facing app. The IAQ app is purpose-built to increase consumer confidence, such as when a tenant is considering their leasing options, an employee is re-entering their workspace, or when a guest is booking a hotel.
Today’s consumers have emerged from the early days of the pandemic knowing more about healthy air than they did a year ago. A recent survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers showed that 91% of consumers recognize the importance of IAQ, with 76% saying they’d want to see IAQ metrics on the public buildings they’re entering and 77% saying hotel IAQ would impact where they stay. With IAQ poised to influence consumers’ return to public spaces and therefore commercial real estate’s recovery, Carbon Lighthouse built its IAQ solution leveraging its expertise building and deploying advanced data-driven building controls, which have been optimized through the company’s patented AI platform and its data from 100M sq. ft. of CRE analyzed. The result is that Carbon Lighthouse’s IAQ solution offers detailed instructions; streaming data; and marketable, on-demand IAQ metrics to show occupants that a building is optimized to provide good, stable indoor air quality.
“When the risks to human health and to the health of the business are this high, the tried and true attraction and retention strategies that worked even a year ago, are no longer viable. Only those building owners and property teams that can confidently market the safety of the air in their buildings will win back the trust needed to rebuild occupancy,” said Brenden Millstein, President overseeing Product at Carbon Lighthouse. “Carbon Lighthouse is proud to be using our decade’s worth of real building and HVAC expertise, enhanced technology platform, and our vast data-capturing capabilities to help CRE prove their impact-driven commitments to safety, wellness, and transparency to drive economic recovery across their portfolios.”
The IAQ solution was designed to increase confidence among today’s leading workforce—of which 50% are millennials who demand greater transparency across all areas of their lives and favor technology-enabled solutions. They share personal data with ease and view data transparency as a two-way street where they expect brands, employers, and others to share information back. With a Deloitte survey of millennials showing their top two post-pandemic concerns being healthcare/disease prevention (30%) followed closely by climate change (20%), periodically assessed building certifications will not suffice when it comes to forming an opinion about dynamic conditions like air quality or deeply concerning topics like the true sustainability of public buildings. Carbon Lighthouse’s IAQ solution uses real-time IAQ data to provide the demonstrable social responsibility—the “S” in ESG—to instill confidence among today’s battle-tested occupants that the air they’re breathing meets current quality standards and that building owners are proactively working to deliver healthy spaces for occupants and guests.
In six weeks, Carbon Lighthouse establishes a data stream to capture the most relevant IAQ data—CO2, Air Quality Index (AQI), Air Exchange Rate, Outdoor Air Percentage, Filtration Rating, Humidity, and Temperature—from existing building systems. Then, unique building data is analyzed against the 100M sq. ft of real CRE building data in its patented CLUES® AI platform to identify where site teams can quickly improve indoor air quality. Once good, stable air quality is achieved, owners decide when to turn on the occupant-facing app and have additional safeguards to ensure the building scores remain consistently good, including:
- Real-time alerts to instantly notify site team if ratings dip below “Good”
- “In Review” ratings used when rare issues are being addressed by on-site teams
- Sensors collect data and present an hourly building average, reducing score volatility from ad hoc events that don’t pose material risk, such as the use of a vape pen
- Continuous monitoring by Carbon Lighthouse and ongoing direct action by site teams ensures buildings maintain good air quality even as conditions change inside and outside the building.
Carbon Lighthouse’s IAQ solution offers on-going, long-term benefits beyond the immediate opportunities to drive re-occupancy including:
- Check off certification prerequisites: The solution helps towards earning major real estate health and wellness certifications
- Alignment with guidance from the major health authorities, such as CDC, WHO, ASHRAE, EPA
- Continuous data streams, endless value: The same energy and operational data streams established for IAQ can be tapped to achieve other ESG goals and increase asset value across portfolios through the company’s Efficiency Production service for new NOI, top-line revenue, carbon emissions reduction, energy savings, and operational efficiencies
