How property teams can use Utilities Insights to influence tenant usage behaviour

Modern real estate operators have a problem.

They have invested heavily in smart meters, sensors, sub meters and gateways throughout their buildings. They have partnered with ESG and utility data providers to capture data across electricity, water, heat and gas. They collect, aggregate and analyse this data in dashboards and reports to inform their ESG strategies, to comply with regulations, and to track performance against sustainability targets.

But there is a critical gap.

While the data is flowing to the management level, the tenants—the people who actually use the energy—are left out of the loop.

The Missing Layer: Tenant Visibility

Think about it from a tenant's perspective. They work or live in a building, yet they often have little to no insight into their own utilities usage. They don't know how much energy their unit consumes, how it compares to others, or what simple changes could make a difference.

Without visibility, there is no feedback loop—and without a feedback loop, behaviour doesn't change.

This is where Chainels' Utilities Insights module comes in.

What is Utilities Insights?

Utilities Insights is a feature within the Chainels platform that connects to a building's smart metering infrastructure and presents utilities data directly to tenants and residents—within their own tenant app.

Rather than keeping this data siloed in facility management or ESG reporting tools, Utilities Insights makes it visible and actionable at the unit level.

Tenants can see:

• Their own electricity, water, gas and heat usage
• Usage trends over time (daily, weekly, monthly)
• How their usage compares to building averages
• Easy-to-understand breakdowns that highlight patterns and anomalies

The data is displayed in clean, digestible formats—no engineering degree required.

Why Does Tenant Visibility Matter?

The research is clear: when people can see the impact of their behaviour, they are more likely to change it.

1. It creates a feedback loop

When tenants see their energy usage in real-time, they become more conscious of their habits. Leaving lights on, over-heating a space, or running systems inefficiently becomes tangible. The app creates a natural nudge toward better behaviour without the need for penalties or enforcement.

2. It supports ESG goals from the ground up

Most ESG strategies are top-down. Targets are set at the portfolio level, but meeting those targets depends on what happens at the building and unit level. By engaging tenants directly, property teams can turn ESG from a management exercise into a community effort.

3. It reduces operational friction

When tenants have visibility into their own consumption, they are less likely to raise complaints about billing, comfort or service quality—because they understand the data themselves. This frees up property management teams to focus on value-adding work.

4. It aligns with green lease principles

Green leases increasingly require landlords and tenants to share data and collaborate on sustainability. Utilities Insights provides the infrastructure for this collaboration in a frictionless, digital format.

How It Works in Practice

Let's say you manage a mixed-use development with 200 residential units and 30 commercial tenants.

Your smart meters are already capturing electricity and water data at the unit level. Today, that data feeds into your ESG reporting tool, where your sustainability team reviews it quarterly.

With Utilities Insights, that same data is now also surfaced in the Chainels app—which your tenants already use for community communication, bookings, service requests and building information.

A residential tenant opens the app and sees that their electricity usage last month was 15% higher than the building average. They can drill down to see which weeks were the highest and connect it to their behaviour (perhaps they were working from home more, or left the heating running).

A commercial tenant sees that their water usage spiked unusually in October. They raise it with facility management, who discovers a running tap in the kitchen—saving both water and money.

The point is: the data is already there. Utilities Insights simply puts it in front of the people who can act on it.

What Makes This Different?

There are plenty of sustainability dashboards and energy management tools on the market. What makes Utilities Insights different is context.

It lives inside the same app tenants already use every day—not in a separate platform they need to log into, learn, and remember. It sits alongside their community feed, bookings, deliveries and service requests.

This matters because adoption is everything. A standalone energy app might have beautiful analytics, but if tenants don't open it, it achieves nothing. By embedding utilities data into the tenant experience platform, Chainels ensures it becomes a natural part of the tenant's digital routine.

Getting Started

If your buildings already have smart metering infrastructure, enabling Utilities Insights is straightforward:

1. Your Chainels account manager will work with you to identify which data sources are available and how to connect them.
2. We support integrations with the most common metering and data providers in the market. If you already work with providers like Ista, Techem, MClimate, Hysopt, Priva or similar providers, you are in good hands, as we are already or have already worked on integrations with them.
3. Once the integration is completed, the operations team will enable utilities insights in your community!