Portfolio management

Portfolio Management comprises the strategic oversight and coordination of various retrofit projects across a group of buildings or homes; this is an alternative to the more piecemeal and isolated approach which is common current practice for retrofit. Good portfolio management enables analysis of whole sets of properties, to optimise retrofit programmes and unlock economies of scale.  

Key aspects of portfolio management include:  

• Data management: ensuring building performance data such as EPC data, energy usage statistics, and maintenance history are easily accessible to facilitate data-driven decision making. 

• Planning: enabling goals and targets to be set for factors such as carbon production, energy efficiency, or EPC ratings; and aggregating programmes of work that enable scale of delivery. 

• Budget management: identifying suitable funding schemes for collections of properties, generating place based retrofit options to reduce costs evenly across multiple asset owners. 

• Risk mitigation: ensuring potential risks and issues to a retrofit project – such as access issues and building extensions – are clearly known in advance of project initiation. 

• Performance monitoring: tracking project outcomes and the performance of products, to enable improved accuracy and correlation of as-designed performance to as-built performance. 

Portfolio Management for retrofit currently has the following challenges: 

• Quality and location of data:
  • Property data is often spread through a multitude of different sources, and a data set for a given property is often incomplete.  
  • Data can sometimes be incorrect. For example, archetype classifications for buildings, which may incorrectly rule out properties from retrofit programmes.  
  • Data may often lack the necessary information or granularity of detail to be useful for manufacturers of retrofit solutions; or in some cases, no data may exist. 

• Cost and complexity of creating a complete portfolio: 
  • There is a high upfront cost to collating data and/or filling identified gaps in the data, with no guarantees of payback. 

• Collaboration of asset owners: 
  • For a portfolio management system to be effective in delivering retrofit at scale, collaboration between multiple asset owners will be required, to maximise the benefit of grouping properties by area. 

• Product matching and performance: 
  • Without a holistic approach to portfolio management, it is likely to be challenging to identify suitable products or solutions which can apply at scale/across multiple projects. 
  • Performance monitoring, which could feed back useful data to understand as-built performance, is not widely adopted, and/or may be insufficient.  

• In an ideal future state, portfolio management consists of one central platform containing all relevant housing data for a collection of properties. This data contains everything required to construct programmes of work to enable place-based retrofit, enabling grouping of properties to facilitate affordable delivery at scale. The platform will bring together EPC data, visual scan data, and maintenance history for properties; this can be used to set targets for the property group in line with net zero requirements. This is a fundamental step in aggregating the pipeline of projects, enabling visibility of future demand to the industry, and the ability to design and develop corresponding products and manufacturing processes. 

• This platform can then be used to inform decisions on suitable retrofit packages that could be applied to a property grouping; matching a portfolio to suitable financing and products to achieve the desired cost, performance, and environmental targets. 

• The platform would utilise feedback loops that use real-world project data, leveraging smart meters and other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to refine estimations of retrofit benefits and the required steps to achieve the desired targets.  

• A greater depth and breadth of nationwide data would be consistently added to the platform, enabling retrofit to scale to one million homes per annum. 

• Automated analysis of property portfolio data would enable quicker project creation by matching retrofit needs, necessary scale and products with funding and interested parties to deliver required upgrades. For more information, please see the packaged retrofits chapter. 

Questions

• Where does the upfront finance come from to collate and gather all the necessary data for the platform? 

• What are landlord’s and asset owner’s needs and requirements regarding contracting? 

Enablers

• Access to funding in the DEMAND phase, prior to project initiation. 
• Better performance data collection.

Key insights

• Collaboration between asset owners and landlords will enable economies of scale and retrofit rates to expand at a faster pace. 

Guidelines

• Adequate costing and budget provided in the DEMAND phase, facilitating more accurate, detailed data to the DEVELOP and DEPLOY phases.