The asset
Every office and branch of one of New Zealand’s big four banks. The property team faced rising energy costs, little visibility of indoor conditions across the branch network, and space decisions running on assumption. Sites spread across the country meant manual checks could not keep up, and without site-level data it was hard to pinpoint inefficiencies or justify an upgrade to a landlord.
What the data found
After-hours waste first. Lighting and HVAC were running overnight in unoccupied branches, visible within weeks of the meters going in. Schedules were corrected across the network and the overnight load came down.
Then a fault that complaints alone had not fixed. One regional branch kept overheating, and staff discomfort was easy to dismiss without evidence. The IEQ sensors captured the pattern, the bank took the data to the building’s landlord, and the HVAC system was repaired and upgraded. The same sensors verified the fix and the improvement in conditions afterwards.
In the head offices, occupancy data showed underused meeting rooms, variable desk use, and queues at peak cafe times. Design and right-sizing conversations moved onto measured numbers.
What we delivered
Utility metering for consumption and peak load. IEQ sensing across CO2, temperature, humidity, and air quality. Occupancy sensing for how each floor and branch actually gets used. All of it lands in one dashboard the facilities team works from daily, with alerts when a site drifts. Aotea Group delivered the installs site by site, sequenced around branch trading hours, until the whole network was covered.
The numbers
- Every office and branch metered, nationwide
- Utility, occupancy, and IEQ data on one record per site
- After-hours running corrected across the network once overnight waste showed up in the data
- One branch HVAC fault evidenced, repaired by the landlord, and verified fixed by the same sensors
- Meeting-room, desk, and cafe patterns measured, feeding workplace design decisions
Why it worked
A branch network hides its waste in small rooms: no single site looks bad enough to act on, and the aggregate never shows up on one bill. Metering every site put the aggregate on one screen and made each fix specific - this branch, this schedule, this landlord conversation. The bank’s head of property put the economics plainly: “One month of power savings across our portfolio will pay for the full Tether monitoring suite.”
