Mike Zatz – Senior Vice President of Global Data Ecosystem & Partnerships – Measurabl

Please tell us about your position at Measurabl and your experience in the sustainability and real estate sectors.

I recently joined Measurabl as Senior Vice President of Global Data Ecosystem & Partnerships, where I lead efforts to build a connected ecosystem of diverse partners who can leverage a single global sustainability dataset to support real estate transactions and decision-making.

Before joining Measurabl, I spent nearly two decades leading the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Commercial Buildings program, where, through collaboration with a myriad of stakeholders, we established Portfolio Manager as the trusted foundation for sustainability data across the U.S. and Canada. That model-rooted in trust, access to a free tool and database, easy data sharing, and collaboration-allows tens of thousands of cities, states, and private organizations to measure, compare, and improve building performance efficiently and consistently.

At Measurabl, I’m continuing that same mission on a global scale. We’re building a consistent, high-quality database and an ecosystem of program partners to allow sustainability data to flow freely, securely, and efficiently across the entire real estate value chain. Our goal is to make that data not only accessible but actionable, enabling better decisions that accelerate decarbonization and resilience worldwide.

What does this new partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council California mean for building owners and investors across the state?

To simplify the process of complying with benchmarking and Building Performance Standard (BPS) laws at the local and state level, USGBC-CA has partnered with Measurabl – a six-time ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year award winner – to offer California’s building owners and operators free access to Measurabl’s technology platform.

The free offering enables energy, water, waste, and carbon benchmarking, supports regulatory compliance, and ensures data quality and consistency across the state and nationwide. Through this collaboration, Measurabl is pleased to serve as the preferred benchmarking platform for the new California Building Performance Hub (Hub), a centralized digital resource designed to help owners, policymakers, and service providers meet the state’s BPS and accelerate decarbonization, all at no cost.

How does Measurabl’s role within the California Building Performance Hub help stakeholders meet Building Performance Standards and accelerate decarbonization?

California’s Building Performance Standards (BPS) and similar local ordinances require real estate owners and operators to track, report, and improve energy and/or carbon performance each year.

Together, Measurabl and USGBC-CA are meeting three critical needs: helping stakeholders understand how their buildings perform, comply with evolving regulations, and ensure decision-making is grounded in trusted, consistent data.

Measurabl’s platform consolidates all ordinances and BPS requirements across California and nationwide into a single view across all properties. With a free Measurabl account, owners can track deadlines, understand exposure, and ensure their data is high-quality and submission-ready. The system flags compliance risks portfolio-wide, giving users confidence they’re ready for every reporting cycle. Beyond the software, Measurabl can also assist in preparing and submitting benchmarking reports, leveraging more than a decade of experience in submitting 800+ reports annually across six California benchmarking programs.

California has ambitious targets to reduce building-related emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. How is Measurabl helping the industry move toward those goals?

The statewide commitment to achieving significant reductions in building-related emissions on an accelerated timeframe comes at a time when many real estate stakeholders still struggle to access consistent, high-quality data needed to measure performance and develop improvement plans. Closing that gap is key to progress, and it depends on interoperable tools that simplify compliance and provide insights that make outcomes more predictable and achievable.

Recognizing that California laws require the use of ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager to comply with their various requirements, Measurabl’s free solution includes an automated sync to Portfolio Manager. In a single step from the Measurabl platform, which takes only a few minutes, users can connect to their Portfolio Manager account and share all of their buildings in their free Measurabl account. Users then benefit from all of the insights provided by Portfolio Manager, and also enjoy additional insights provided by Measurabl at no cost. Those additional insights will help owners and operators to identify improvement opportunities in their individual buildings or portfolios, and all changes made to the data sync back to Portfolio Manager automatically. So there’s really no reason that users of Portfolio Manager shouldn’t also take advantage of a free Measurabl account to get the best of both tools.

With the insights gained from Measurabl, owners and managers can then leverage the many self-service resources available through the California Building Performance Hub, or they can engage with other Hub partners to develop an improvement plan and to guide implementation of improvement measures. By combining USGBC California’s local leadership with Hub resources and Measurabl’s free data infrastructure, we’re helping owners and operators across the state access the data and insights they need to perform better and contribute to achieving California’s climate goals.

What are some of the biggest data challenges you see in the real estate sector, and how does Measurabl’s platform address these challenges?

One of the biggest challenges in real estate sustainability today is that utility and building data is often incomplete, inconsistent, or difficult to compare across buildings and systems. 

Many owners are still relying on manual data collection and static spreadsheets, which makes it hard to maintain accuracy or keep up with evolving reporting requirements. These gaps lead to uncertainty in benchmarking, compliance, and investment decisions — especially as sustainability performance becomes directly tied to financial and regulatory outcomes.

Measurabl’s platform offers a number of features to address these issues, starting with the automated sync to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager that is offered for free to all users, but extending further to connections with thousands of utilities to automatically transfer data, and also to new technology automating the upload of utility bills. 

And beyond issues with entering data accurately, there’s the matter of insights gained from that data. Measurabl continually analyzes data in the tool to develop new insights and peer benchmarks. But these benchmarks are only as useful as the data behind them, and we hope that through the use of our free offering, the depth and breadth of data we can analyze will increase substantially, and as a result, the insights gained from those analyses can be more helpful to all stakeholders throughout the ecosystem.

Looking ahead, what plans and goals do you and the company have for the next few years?

Making a portion of our platform free was a major step in catalyzing more profitable, sustainable real estate globally. 

The next step is to establish Measurabl as the source of truth for sustainability data in real estate-by extending coverage and integrating more partners, like lenders, insurers, real estate consultants, and technology companies, so verified data can power smarter decisions and better outcomes. 

The more everyone in this space works together to develop a single, consistent dataset that can be leveraged for any need, the more transactions will be streamlined for everyone. Our goal is to activate the entire ecosystem to create shared value, and we invite others to contact us to explore how we can work together.