With continual rises in water costs, how will you pay for water?
Multi-family communities are continually facing challenges of rising expenditures. The question is how can a property management company or landlord minimize these expenses.

Currently there are really only two methods for capturing utility expenditures such as water and sewer: Allocation and Municipal Metering.

ALLOCATION

With allocation, the annual water bill is divided by the number of months and then by the number of units to derive a fixed rate. That rate is then added into the monthly assessments and charged to each tenant. Another way is the water bill is divided proportionately by total square footage of your apartment. Bigger apartments pay more. Problems with allocation are:

• Increased Overall Water Consumption: Allocation hides the true cost of water and sewer from the homeowner. As a result, overall property water consumption increases, which increases resident assessments.
• Unfair Invoicing: Allocation unfairly charges residents who consume little while subsidizing high water consumers. A resident that consumes 1,000 gallons of water per month will pay part of the water bill for the resident that consumes 7,000 gallons.
• Penalizes the Property Owner: Allocation allows leakage issues to continue undetected. Such issues can waste tens of thousands of gallons of water, which all residents pay for.

MUNICIPAL METERING

With municipal metering, an individual meter is attached to each unit and specific unit consumption is measured. An invoice is prepared for each unit by applying the municipality water rate to the specific volume of water consumed. In all reality this is the most sought after way to meter and bill tenants. Everything is handled by the water authority. The problems are:

• Many older multi-family properties have old piping in the walls, and the water lines split off in all directions. This makes it impossible to meter each apartment separately without hiring a plumber.
• Hiring a plumbing company to separate your water lines in old property can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. The return on investment is quite long.
• Some municipalities do not allow for individual water metering and only allow for one master water meter to be installed per property. This prevents the ability to separate the water lines regardless of cost.

TRUE SUBMETER SOLUTION

The True Submeter solution is the best and only option like it on the market. By installing our submeters on each point of use water line in each apartment the property owner never has to worry about high plumbing expenses to change pipes. They also get the high accuracy and remote monitoring that the municipalities use. Finally, the property owner gets to monitor the usage in each apartment individually, even with the ability to have leak detection at each sink, toilet, and shower head! Other advantages are:

• Lower Property Water Consumption: Making owners individually responsible statistically lowers property water consumption by 30% – 40%. This metering helps to conserve our most precious commodity.
• Fair Invoicing: Submetering fairly charges each resident for his or her personal usage. You only pay for your water and not your neighbor’s.
• Adapts to Rate Changes: Submetering is immediately adaptive to municipality rate increases. The landlord only has to log into their database and change the billing rate.