The Shocking Truth About Your Apartment's Water Bill

If you know that your bill is not going to change, your water use is going to change, meaning you're not going to care whether you turn off the sink while you're brushing your teeth, or you do a load of laundry with 2 pieces of clothing in there, or run the dishwasher with 4 dishes in there. It's only when that bill fluctuates based upon the property's usage that does that actually modify the behavior of the resident. You want the resident to think that my usage and my consumption is going to change my bill. But doing it as a flat rate, although it sounds appealing as an owner because it sounds easy, you're actually not incentivizing your residents to conserve. Not only do you want your residents to conserve, that brings the property bill down, but it allows them to start taking accountability for their usage and modifying their behavior because of that. So you want them to again take that accountability and responsibility for their usage and make them think about that when they're using water or hearing their toilet run at night. You have to unbundle the water, the sewer, the trash. You're having to unbundle the cable, unbundle— if you can unbundle all of these things, you can actually drive NOI through these different technologies.