Utility data for residential landlords and multifamily portfolios

A residential landlord with a few thousand suites across a dozen buildings has a data problem that a commercial office owner does not. In an office tower, the owner usually pays the main meters and recovers costs through the lease. In an apartment building, the suites are often individually metered, so the people using most of the electricity are the utility's customers, not the landlord. The owner sees the house meter, the common areas, and the central plant, and has to guess at the rest.

This guide is for owners, asset managers, and property management firms running multifamily portfolios, and for the consultants who benchmark and retrofit them. It covers what data a landlord needs at the building and portfolio level, why tenant metering makes whole-building totals so hard to obtain, what aggregated data utilities can provide, and how authorized connections, Green Button, and PDF bill digitization fit together. Organizations like these, including large residential landlords, have recently started using EZGB for this reason.

What a multifamily owner needs the data for

Benchmarking is the formal driver in Ontario. Large building owners must report energy and water use annually by July 1 for buildings 50,000 square feet and larger, covering all forms of energy the building uses plus water, through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, and buildings of 100,000 square feet or more must have a certified professional verify the reported information. Most mid-rise and high-rise rental buildings are well inside that threshold. Multifamily Housing is also one of the 16 property types eligible for a 1-100 ENERGY STAR score in Canada, which requires at least 12 full consecutive months of energy data and meters that account for all energy use for all fuel types.

Beyond the regulation, the same data drives asset management decisions: which buildings are outliers on energy intensity, whether a boiler plant replacement is paying back, how utility recoveries compare with actual costs, and what a lender or investor doing environmental due diligence will ask for. Emissions reporting is increasingly part of that conversation, and the guide to calculating GHG emissions from utility data shows why consumption by fuel is the starting point.

The data a landlord needs

Owner-paid accounts, every building: house electricity, common areas, central heating or cooling plant, domestic hot water, natural gas, and water, monthly, with consumption and cost.
Whole-building totals: owner-paid plus tenant-paid consumption, which for benchmarking has to include the suites even when the owner never sees those bills.
Interval data on the central plant: hourly or 15-minute electricity reads on the house meter, which show whether a chiller, make-up air unit, or garage ventilation schedule is driving demand.
Sub-meter data where the owner bills tenants: for buildings on a sub-metering arrangement, the per-suite reads that support recoveries and, summed, give the building total.
A stable property map: which accounts and meters belong to which building and which parcel, maintained as buildings are bought, sold, and re-metered.

Why whole-building data is so hard to get

NRCan's guidance for utilities on whole-building data states the problem plainly. In a multi-tenant or multifamily property, each individual tenant or resident is a customer of record and the building owner is therefore considered a third party, and the guidance goes on to say that obtaining complete consumption data for the entire building may be functionally impossible for owners of large multi-tenant or multifamily residential properties without a mechanism for aggregated data.

The mechanism NRCan recommends is aggregation with a privacy threshold. The same guidance notes that utilities providing aggregate data to building owners apply thresholds in the range of 10 customers or tenants or more, and that some use a secondary 4/50 criterion, where a property must have four or more customers and no single one accounts for 50 percent or more of the total. It also recommends providing aggregate data monthly, uploading it directly to the owner's Portfolio Manager record through the Portfolio Manager API where the utility is large enough to support that, and giving owners an itemized receipt listing which meters make up the total. Whether a particular utility offers this, and on what terms, varies, and the landlord's first job is to find out.

The second difficulty is the number of accounts. A portfolio of twenty buildings can hold well over a hundred owner-paid accounts across electricity, gas, and water, billed by different utilities in different municipalities, with statements arriving at head office, at the property manager, and sometimes at the building. Reconstructing a year of consumption from that flow is the task asset managers dread, and the property portfolio data collection guide describes the pattern.

The third difficulty is change. Buildings are acquired with accounts still in the vendor's name, suites are converted from bulk to individual metering, and a sub-metering provider replaces the utility as the source of per-suite data. Each event breaks a spreadsheet that assumed the account list was fixed.

How the data can be obtained

Authorized connections and Green Button for owner-paid accounts

For every account where the landlord is the customer of record, Ontario has removed most of the friction. Rate-regulated electricity and natural gas utilities in the province were required to provide Green Button access by November 1, 2023, and the Green Button Alliance reported 55 certified Ontario utility platforms covering nearly 5.4 million electricity customers and over 3.5 million natural gas customers. The landlord authorizes a Connect My Data connection once per account, and billing and interval data then arrive on an ongoing basis in a standard format. The authorization is revocable at any time through the utility. How that authorization works under the hood is covered in OAuth authorization in Green Button Connect My Data.

Aggregated whole-building data and sub-meter data

For tenant-paid suites, the owner either obtains aggregated whole-building totals from the utility where that service exists, or, where the owner bills tenants through a sub-metering arrangement, works from the sub-meter reads it already holds. Either way the suite consumption has to be added to the owner-paid accounts to produce a building total that Portfolio Manager will accept. The sub-metering and interval data management guide covers the sub-meter side in more depth.

PDF bill digitization for water, older records, and other provinces

Municipal water bills, fuel oil, accounts in provinces without Green Button, and history older than the utility portal retains do not come through a connection. Those statements are digitized: account, period, consumption, and cost are extracted from the PDF, validated against adjacent periods, and loaded into the same dataset.

What EZGB does

EZGB collects consumption and billing data from utilities through authorized utility connections, Green Button (Download My Data and Connect My Data), and PDF bill digitization. It standardizes the result into consistent units and fields across utilities, fuels, and municipalities, and delivers it by API, CSV, or SFTP into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, RETScreen, Power BI, and CRMs. EZGB is part of MartinAI, built by Screaming Power. For a landlord, the result is one portfolio dataset that the benchmarking submission, the asset management dashboard, and the due diligence package all draw from.

If the annual benchmarking cycle still starts with a bill hunt, the fastest way to scope the work is to go through the account list together. Book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca.

What it costs in effort and time

The effort is front-loaded and scales with the number of accounts rather than buildings. Assembling the inventory needs input from accounts payable and each property manager, and the authorizations need someone with signing authority. Ontario electricity and gas accounts with Connect My Data are the fastest to bring on because the authorization is a one-time step. Water and older records take longer because statements must be located and digitized. Aggregated tenant data depends on what each utility offers and how quickly it responds.

Once the portfolio is connected, the ongoing work is review and maintenance: mapping acquisitions, retiring sold buildings, checking anomalies, and exporting ahead of the July 1 deadline. Every cycle after the first starts from data that is already there.

What to do with the data once you have it

Benchmark every building in the portfolio on the same basis, and file the Ontario submission from records that were kept current through the year.
Rank buildings by energy and water intensity to decide where audits and capital go first.
Measure retrofit results against a baseline of actual consumption rather than modelled estimates.
Reconcile utility recoveries against real consumption where the owner bills tenants.
Answer lender and investor due diligence with a dataset that already exists instead of assembling one under deadline.

For the mechanics of the reporting tool itself, see getting utility data into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.

Frequently asked questions

Can a landlord see individual tenants' utility usage?

Not without the tenant's authorization. Each tenant is the customer of record for their own suite. What a landlord can pursue is an aggregated whole-building total from the utility, subject to the utility's privacy threshold, which NRCan's guidance describes as typically around 10 customers or a 4/50 rule. Where the owner bills tenants through sub-metering, the owner already holds the per-suite reads.

Do all our buildings have to be benchmarked in Ontario?

The Ontario requirement applies to buildings 50,000 square feet and larger, with certified verification at 100,000 square feet and larger. Smaller buildings are outside it, but most owners benchmark them anyway once the data is flowing, because the comparison across the portfolio is where the value is.

Which accounts can be connected automatically?

Owner-paid electricity and natural gas accounts with Ontario's rate-regulated utilities can generally be connected through Green Button once authorized. Water, fuel oil, other provinces, and older history usually arrive as bills and are digitized.

What happens when we buy or sell a building?

On acquisition, the accounts are added to the inventory, transferred into the new owner's name, and authorized for connection; the vendor's historical bills can be digitized to backfill the baseline. On sale, the connections are revoked and the building is retired from the dataset with its history kept.

Does EZGB submit the benchmarking report for us?

No. EZGB provides the standardized consumption and billing data and delivers it into Portfolio Manager or your own systems. The submission, any required verification, and the interpretation remain the owner's responsibility, and we do not claim that using EZGB satisfies a regulatory obligation on its own.

Sources

Source: natural-resources.canada.ca