Student housing · Electrical package with BMS built in
BMS-grade building data for student housing, at electrical installation prices.
Valkrea supplies the electrical package for student housing with a building management system already built in, so operators get room-level consumption, maintenance and ESG data without paying commercial BMS prices.
Every room in a 200-room scheme, shaded by consumption, with two flagged.
- added to NOI every year
- €39,000–€103,000
- gross value uplift
- €0.74m–€1.96m
- more on the total build cost
- ~1%
Modelled for a 200-room new-build scheme at a 5.25% net initial yield. Every input is stated in the returns section so you can swap in your own.
The problem
Student housing gets built blind
An operator running student housing pays the energy and water bills, absorbs the maintenance cost, and is being asked by lenders and funds for operational ESG data the building cannot produce. The systems that would give them all three were built for commercial offices. They need an integrator to design them building by building, they cost commercial prices, and they arrive as a separate workstream bolted onto the electrical installation.
So student schemes get built with a conventional electrical set-up, and everything that follows is guesswork: no room-level consumption, no early warning on a leak or a failing fan coil, no telemetry for a CSRD report, no SRI score.
Four things are converging over the next few years.
Recast EPBD
Now landing in national law across the EU.
CSRD and SFDR
Funds must disclose operational data that current installations cannot generate.
SRI scoring
The Smart Readiness Indicator will start marking buildings down.
Energy cost recovery
Increasingly critical to operator margins as tariffs move.
What it looks like on the ground
Operators rarely experience this as a missing system. They experience it as recurring events.
Energy
How many rooms are you heating when they are empty?
Rooms conditioned around the clock, HVAC running behind open windows, and winter and summer breaks paid for in full.
Maintenance
How often does your team visit a room twice, once to diagnose and once to fix?
Callouts that turn out to be an open window or a switched-off fan coil, and the January complaint queue.
Emergency callouts
How much more did your last out-of-hours callout cost than the same job planned?
Weekend lockouts at emergency contractor rates, and equipment degrading quietly before it fails.
Overconsumption
Do you know which ten of your rooms use twice the energy of the rest?
All-inclusive rents carry headroom over fair use because consumption is invisible, and fair-use billing needs real-time data to work at all.
Water leaks
When a toilet runs in room 214, how long before anyone notices?
A running tap found at the annual meter read, and a damaged room sitting empty for weeks while it dries.
ESG reporting
When your lender asks for energy intensity per building, is the answer minutes away or weeks away?
Year-end utility PDFs retyped into spreadsheets for a GRESB submission that would be worth more with sub-metered data.
Mould
In how many of last winter’s mould complaints could you prove how the room was heated and ventilated?
One of the more expensive landlord and tenant disputes, made more likely by retrofits that tighten the envelope. In Germany the landlord carries the burden of proof.
Smoke detectors
What does it cost to get a technician into 200 occupied rooms for the annual check?
Function checks need coordinated access, and a detector taken down by a resident goes unnoticed until the next one.
How it works
Your electrical installation budget could now cover a BMS
Every scheme already pays for an electrical package. Valkrea is that package with the building management system built in, so the intelligence arrives with the wiring.
Data and control
Cost
Conventional electrical
Switches, sockets, one meter for the building.
Nothing measured at room level. What student housing gets built with today.
The baseline
Data and control
Cost
Sub-metered electrical
A meter per room, read manually or exported once a year.
Consumption visible in hindsight, nothing controlled and nothing detected.
A small premium and a reporting job
Data and control
Cost
Commercial BMS
Room-level control, fault detection, reporting.
Designed by an integrator building by building and delivered as a separate workstream at commercial office prices.
A full BMS project
Data and control
Cost
Valkrea
The electrical package with the BMS built in. Room-level consumption, fault and leak detection, ESG data, running on an edge computer in the building.
Preassembled, preconfigured, installed by your electrician.
Roughly 1% more on the total build
Data and control is what the operator gets. Cost is the premium over a conventional electrical package.
What Valkrea supplies
01
Design and specification
A paid engagement that turns one scheme’s drawings into a fully specified smart-ready installation, priced and ready for your electrical contractor to build. €4,900 for a standard PBSA layout up to 200 rooms, credited in full against a supply order placed within six months. Delivered in three weeks from a complete document set.
02
The installation
Preassembled, preconfigured room kits and a building kit, delivered labelled by room with positions and wiring marked, installed by your own electrician. The BMS configuration is generated from the building plans. Active energy management, the operator dashboard, and fault and anomaly detection are included. Available for new build and for deep-renovation retrofit.
03
The subscription
Predictive maintenance, ESG reporting and API access, charged per room per month from the day the building is accepted. The APIs feed the ESG or BMS cloud platform you already run, so nothing has to be replaced.
Residents get conventional switches that behave the way they expect. There is no app to install and no smart-home layer for your team to support. And there is no bespoke BMS project: the configuration comes from the plans, the equipment arrives pre-built, and each building runs its own software instance on an edge computer on your premises, so it keeps operating without depending on a central cloud platform.
The returns
A small, permanent lift in NOI is worth a large multiple of itself
Most operators know a BMS saves energy. Fewer have priced what that saving does to the asset. The numbers below are a worked model for a 200-room new-build scheme using Valkrea’s current figures. Every input is stated so you can swap in your own, and we will replace the model with measured results as the first installations report.
The operational return
Valkrea adds €39,000 to €103,000 a year to net operating income through energy recovery, lower maintenance and water costs, and fair-use billing. The average case is €73,500 against an all-in cost of about €337,000, a payback of 4.6 years on operations alone (8.6 years in the low case, 3.3 in the high). Over twenty years the average case returns an IRR of 24.5%. After payback, the saving drops to the bottom line every year.
The asset value
A student housing asset is valued on the income it produces. Capitalised at a 5.25% net initial yield, €73,500 of additional recurring NOI is worth about €1.40m of gross value uplift, around 4.2x the capital. The low case gives €743,000 and 2.2x; the high case €1.96m and 5.8x. For an owner heading towards a refinance or a sale, that is the number that matters.
| Low | Average | High | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year-one NOI uplift | €39,000 | €73,500 | €103,000 |
| All-in cost | €336,800 | €336,800 | €336,800 |
| Payback on operations alone | 8.6 years | 4.6 years | 3.3 years |
| Gross value uplift at 5.25% NIY | €743,000 | €1.40m | €1.96m |
| Multiple on capital | 2.2x | 4.2x | 5.8x |
Where the NOI comes from
- Savings (energy and maintenance combined)
- Fair-use billing
- Data and risk mitigation
The net initial yield drives the asset value figure. At 4% the same NOI is worth about €1.84m; at 6%, about €1.23m. We use your yield when we have it. Gross value uplift is before purchaser’s costs and transaction taxes, which vary by market. Figures are from Valkrea’s NOI bridge model v2.1 and will be replaced with measured results from the first installations.
Process
From drawings to a commissioned building in four steps
Three signatures mark the path: a letter of intent and design order at the start, a supply and subscription agreement after the pack, and an acceptance certificate at handover. Durations are indicative until the first projects give us measured ones.
- 1
Specify
Weeks 0 to 3
You send the drawings or BIM model, the room schedule and bed count, the current electrical specification and a ballpark electrical budget. We hold a kick-off call within five working days, then return the design and specification pack within three weeks of a complete document set: device and panel schedules per room type and common area, marked-up wiring and panel layouts, the automation and metering specification, an energy projection for your scheme, a compliance note covering EPBD, SRI and EN ISO 52120-1, and a fixed-price supply quotation.
- 2
Agree
Weeks 3 to 5
You accept the supply quotation and the design fee is credited in full. The agreement fixes scope, price, delivery date, acceptance test, warranty, service levels, the measurement plan and your named electrical contractor.
- 3
Install
About ten weeks from order to ready-to-ship
Room kits and the building kit are assembled, factory tested and pre-configured for your building, then delivered labelled by room with the installation manual and FAT certificates. Your electrician mounts and wires everything from the manual, so no specialist integrator comes to site. For prefabricated construction, the kits go to the element factory and are wired in there.
- 4
Operate
Two to three weeks after installation
We commission remotely, test every room with your contractor, hand over the dashboards and train your operations team. The acceptance certificate starts the subscription. The first 90 days are hypercare while the building settles and the baseline is measured. After that: a service desk with defined response times, remote monitoring, monthly reports, a quarterly review and an annual measurement and verification report.
From supply order to a commissioned building is about four months, plus whatever your contractor’s programme needs.
What your team sees
One view of every room, and an early warning before it becomes a callout
The operator dashboard shows consumption by room, building and portfolio. It flags anomalies such as heating running behind an open window, a tap that has not stopped, or a fan coil that has gone quiet. And it produces the energy intensity, water and equipment data your CSRD, SRI and GRESB reporting need, captured at source. The same data is available over an API, so it can feed the ESG or BMS platform you already use.
Valkrea operator dashboard
Illustrative data
Rooms by consumption
Alerts
- Room 214 · water flow continuous for 6 h
- Room 118 · heating on, window open 40 min
- Block B · fan coil 3 not responding
Reporting
- Energy intensity
- 84 kWh/m²/yr
- Water
- 96 l/bed/day
Who it’s for
Built for operators who own the building
Valkrea is designed for student housing operators who own or develop their own stock, where one budget and one decision cover the whole building. The best moment to talk is when a scheme is secured and the electrical package has yet to be specified, but an appointed contractor is no barrier: you specify the equipment the way you specify fibre to every room, and the contractor still does the wiring. The same approach works for co-living, serviced apartments and hotels, because in each case every room is essentially the same.
Student housing
Co-living
Serviced apartments
Hotels
Technical directors
Deliver smarter buildings that are cheaper to run, without adding operational complexity.
Sustainability and ESG leads
Replace inconsistent, manual data collection with credible, real-time information at the source.
Asset managers
Increase asset value, mitigate regulatory risk and improve NOI.
Next step
Talk to us about your next scheme
Tell us about a scheme at any stage, from land secured to contractor appointed. We will come back with whether Valkrea fits, what it would cost on your room count, and what the design and specification pack would cover.
Prefer email? hello@valkrea.com