Polaris Slashes Residential Water Costs With Metron’s Smart Sensors

Intelligent monitoring helps real-estate leader reduce tenants’ water bills by 40%

Polaris Real Estate Partners, a leading real-estate investment company that manages over 4,500 multifamily units spanning Texas and Missouri, today announced that it has dramatically reduced water bills for its residents after partnering with Metron, a global leader in smart metering and water intelligence solutions.

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One of Polaris' residential properties. (Photo: Polaris)

In a pilot project at a Texas apartment campus, Polaris worked with Metron to install dozens of cutting-edge smart meters and connected monitoring devices, providing unprecedented visibility into where and how water was being used—or lost to leaks—across the property. “Many of our properties were built in the 1980s, when the standard was to install a single central water meter for the entire campus—and the plumbing makes it impossible to retrofit each apartment with a conventional water meter,” explains Polaris managing partner Travis Pacoe. “Metron’s smart monitors have finally solved that problem, letting us track water use across the entire property.”

Metron’s high-resolution smart meters and monitors can track water flow in specific zones of a multifamily campus and can also be installed in individual buildings to provide granular data about how and where water is being used. That allows property managers to detect and pinpoint “invisible” leaks in the underground pipes serving the campus—and with minute-by-minute flow data, it’s also possible to identify the telltale signatures of leaky toilets, dripping faucets, and other problems in specific apartments.

“Knowing exactly where the leaks are happening has been a game-changer for us,” Pacoe says. “Before, we’d have had to send work crews door-to-door to try to find leaks—but now, we can make targeted repairs that quickly reduce total water use without driving up our maintenance costs.”

Using Metron’s WaterScope® data-monitoring portal, Polaris property managers were able to rapidly identify a number of significant leaks. Almost overnight, the company saw:

• a 40% reduction in total water use across the property
• a $50+ reduction in monthly water bills per household
• a $100,000 projected reduction in total annual water bills.

With water rates climbing almost 55% over the past decade, and average water bills now reaching almost $50 per month, Metron’s smart monitoring and analytics puts residents in control of their water costs. “Traditional billing methods—known as RUBS—divide bills evenly between all the residents at a given property—but that disincentivizes water conservation and makes it hard to spot in-home water leaks,” explains Matt Kosorok, vice president, enterprise solutions at Metron. “As our work with Polaris shows, intelligent water monitoring can drive significant savings while improving transparency and billing equity for residents.”

Reducing water costs also makes it easier to ensure full occupancy, with lower monthly costs and increased transparency for residents. That, in turn, boosts net operating income and helps to stabilize and increase the total valuation of any given property—an important consideration for companies like Polaris, which run large property portfolios across multiple U.S. regions.

“For this pilot project, we rapidly netted a 20X return on our original investment. As a real-estate investor, there aren’t many property improvements that deliver that kind of ROI,” Pacoe says. “Now, we’re eager to roll out Metron’s solutions across our property portfolio and help even more of our residents to lower their monthly expenses by taking control of their water bills.”

About Metron

Metron^TM is a leading smart water management system and water sustainability company providing real estate and utility customers with near real-time water use data analytics. Metron creates industry-leading customer solutions combining durable, high-performance meters and sensors with WaterScope® Advanced Water Data Software. Nearly 2 billion gallons of water have been saved by Metron’s smart water system’s resource usage optimization, enhanced efficiency, and informed decision making. With 8,000 networked customers and a massive network of installed network devices, Metron propels property water management and sustainability – detecting leaks and abnormal consumption from the utility meter and across a broad range of water users within a complex. Metron serves the Utilities, Municipalities, Manufactured Housing, Multi-Family Housing, Education, Residential and Commercial Real Estate verticals in all 50 states and in Canada.

Learn more: metron-us.com.

About Polaris

Polaris Real Estate Partners owns and manages approximately 4,500 residential units in multifamily properties spanning Texas and Missouri, with a focus on properties developed from 1980 onward. The general partners of Polaris have collectively in excess of 50 years in ownership and management of income producing properties and have been investing continuously for 30 years. The principals have invested successfully in 21 commercial real estate markets in 14 states.

Learn more: polaris-lp.com

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