When the first round of Building Performance Standards (BPS) laws appeared a few years ago, many real estate leaders treated them as a distant storm on the horizon. Fast forward to 2025, and that storm has arrived in full force. More than 40 U.S. jurisdictions now enforce hard energy or carbon reduction targets, with steep financial penalties for buildings that miss the mark.
During our recent webinar, “Navigating Building Performance Standards in 2025,” policy experts and portfolio scale practitioners unpacked what the new rules really mean for owners and occupiers—and how to turn compliance into a strategic advantage. Below are the three most important takeaways.
1. Forget the Finish Line—BPS Is an Ongoing Performance Contract
“The goalposts don’t stay put. Each compliance cycle gets tougher, and many cities are already setting 2030 and 2035 targets.” — Cliff Majersik, Senior Advisor at Institute for Market Transformation
Most organizations still approach sustainability like a sprint: audit the worst offending buildings, fund a batch of retrofits, then declare victory. BPS flips that playbook. It establishes recurring performance checkpoints—often every one to five years—where a building must prove its meeting escalating EUI (energy use intensity) or GHG thresholds.
The implication: compliance is no longer a one and done project. It’s a perpetual performance contract that spans asset management, capital planning, lease strategy, and day to day facilities operations. Successful teams are building living roadmaps that track every site’s projected EUI or carbon score against each jurisdiction’s future targets, then queuing up interventions—low-cost O&M tweaks, deep energy retrofits, or even decommissioning—years in advance.
2. Data Granularity Beats Data Volume
Everyone agrees that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” but the webinar panel drilled into a subtle point: granularity matters more than sheer data quantity.
- Hourly interval data exposes hidden baseload waste (e.g., HVAC running at 2 a.m.) and validates savings from commissioning tweaks.
- Space level submetering clarifies who’s responsible for what load in multitenant assets—critical for allocating upgrade costs or negotiating green leases.
- Normalized datasets (weather adjusted EUI, occupancy adjusted intensity) let you benchmark apples to apples and spot outliers fast.
The upshot is that utility bill scraping alone won’t cut it. Organizations need an integrated data fabric that ingests interval reads, IoT sensor feeds, and BMS data, then rolls everything into a single version of the truth—ideally inside the same platform that handles lease administration and capital projects so the insights flow directly into action.
How Tango helps
Tango Energy & Sustainability can automatically pull 15-minute interval data from utilities, BMS systems, and IoT devices, normalizing it for weather and occupancy, and deliver prescriptive actions inside the same platform you already use for lease, maintenance, and project management. No swivel chair required.
3. Capital Planning Must Marry Emissions Risk with Business Risk
The most animated part of the webinar was the cost of inaction discussion. Panelists cited real world examples:
- A national retailer facing $7 million in cumulative BPS penalties across six metros if it sticks to “run to fail” HVAC replacement.
- A REIT projecting 4–6 percent asset devaluation for Class A office towers that slip into “noncompliant” territory on public scorecards.
- Landlords forced to pause expansion deals because prospective tenants now demand BPS ready certifications.
The thread that ties these stories together is risk—both regulatory and market driven. To build a credible compliance budget, companies must model:
- Penalty trajectories per site (fines often escalate annually).
- Deferred maintenance catchup costs if equipment ages out before its engineered life.
- Revenue impact from lost tenants, brand hits, or delayed openings.
Once those variables live in one model, finance leaders can compare them to the net present value of energy retrofits, onsite renewables, or even asset offloading. BPS compliance becomes a clear-eyed investment decision, not just a feelgood initiative.
How Tango helps
With Tango Energy & Sustainability, you can overlay each property’s BPS schedule, penalty curve, and projected EUI on top of real estate lifecycle costs. The platform then runs ROI scenarios on retrofit packages—lighting, HVAC, envelope, solar—so you can steer capital to the projects that beat both the fine and the payback hurdle.
Pulling It All Together: A Playbook for 2025 and Beyond
- Map Your Exposure
Build an inventory of every property’s BPS jurisdiction, current performance score, and upcoming threshold. Prioritize sites with near term penalties.
- Instrument for Insight
Fill data gaps with interval meters, BMS integrations, and, where practical, submetering. Normalize the data so energy managers and CFOs speak the same language.
- Plan Capital like a Portfolio Manager
Bake compliance milestones and carbon prices into your existing capex model. Treat sustainability projects as risk adjusted investments, not separate “green” budgets.
- Operationalize Compliance
Align facilities, construction, finance, and leasing teams around shared dashboards and autogenerated tasks. Continuous improvement, not annual fire drills.
- Communicate Wins
Publish progress internally and externally. Tenants, investors, and regulators all reward transparency—and they all penalize silence.
Ready to Go Deeper?
Watch the full, 45-minute “Navigating Building Performance Standards in 2025” webinar on demand to hear the panel’s detailed Q&A and see a live demo of Tango Energy & Sustainability in action. You’ll walk away with a clear roadmap—and the technology to execute it.