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A THREE-PHASE GUIDE TO BIMPLEMENTING UTILITY BILLING
Contributed by the Team at LIVABLE
illing residents for water and other that they need to conserve. There are a number of utilities has benefits! Property owners things that property owners and property managers can offset their expenses while need to be aware of ahead of time to ensure that the encouraging conservation. Here are transition to billing goes smoothly. Keep reading for a some of the things you need to be quick overview.
aware of when it comes to billing your tenants for utilities.
BEFORE YOU CHOOSE YOUR UTILITY BILLING SYSTEM: CAREFULLY CONSIDER YOUR
Great news! If you’ve decided to start billing your OPTIONS
tenants for their utility use, you’re not only making them financially accountable for their utility use, you’re also making them environmentally accountable. Public concern about global warming exceeds 50% among most demographic subgroups of Americans, according to Gallup. People are growing increasingly concerned about the environment, and increasingly interested in ways that they can help. In a 2021 Mastercard survey, 85% of people said that they were willing to take personal action to combat environmental and sustainability challenges. Scaling back water and energy use is great for the environment, but it’s not easy to get people motivated to do that.
When residents are responsible for their utility bills, they tend to use utilities more responsibly. Billing your residents can provide them with the extra incentive
You need to figure out which utility billing method works best for your multifamily property. Is retrofitting a submeter in each of your units the best move? At present, are you ready for that financial expense? How easy will it be to coordinate installations with your current tenants? Maybe you want to make use of your property’s master meter and are considering a ratio utility billing system (RUBS). This way, you skip the installation process and all its accompanying headaches and instead use a utility allocation formula that’s fine-tuned to your property.
Whichever option you’re leaning towards, why not reach out to a utility billing expert? You can get help navigating all of the rules and regulations in place surrounding billing, and benefit from their expert guidance on which system would work best for your
AMM1/6 APARTMENT MANAGEMENT MAGAZINE - JULY 2022 67