Audette: Accelerating Change in Commercial Real Estate

The prevailing imagery of fossil fuel use mostly consists of transportation—cars guzzling gas on crowded highways and planes crisscrossing the sky, or energy production, billowing smoke stacks and relentless oil wells. However, a large portion of carbon emissions happen right under our noses, or right above our heads: the buildings we occupy are huge carbon users, and without the powerful imagery of other emitters, this sector is often underappreciated. Audette is an innovative force, providing an important tool that works to make our buildings more efficient for a sustainable future.

A Career in the Built Environment

Christopher Naismith, founder of Audette, is someone who clearly has a passion for buildings. Though he claims to have lacked the artistic abilities necessary to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming an architect, he pursued his passion and achieved success in a similar field—civil engineering. Years of working as an engineer made him an expert on housing development and commercial real estate and reaffirmed his love for the built environment.

Throughout his career, a few issues along the building value chain crystallized for him. First, the small decisions made by architects and engineers during the development process have massive upstream impact. These decisions shape the usage and footprints of buildings, and have legacies that last for decades. He felt that the gravity of these decisions weren’t always appreciated at the time and were not made with the requisite information and consideration. Second, the burden of thoughtful construction and sustainable retrofitting fell almost entirely on the shoulders of engineers who would need to push hard for sustainability, even if developers wanted it: there was simply no tool or anyone else to do it. The scale of commercial real estate development is too great for individual engineers, people like Christopher, to make meaningful and necessary change on their own.

This expertise in building development, passion for the built environment, and understanding of the frictions that slowed meaningful change led Christopher to found Audette, a commercial real estate intelligence platform that guides developers in making decisions as they make their portfolios more sustainable.

Automating the Value Chain

26% of global emissions come from buildings, a large portion of which are for commercial use. These emissions can be drastically reduced through straightforward upgrades, resulting in a large impact on global emissions while simultaneously creating cost savings for the developers that own these buildings. However, finding the optimal places to make these upgrades is currently the job of consulting firms and individual engineers. Creating the energy audits that show developers where optimal upgrades are is expensive, labor intensive, and time consuming. They often require multi-year audits and tons of work from engineers. As someone who worked as one of these consultants, Naismith knew there must be a better way.

As commercial real estate pushes for ESG solutions and net zero by 2050, Audette offers an innovative approach to finding the optimal sustainability solutions. By simply plugging in an address list, Audette almost instantaneously offers developers scenarios and answers; a faster and cheaper alternative to consulting firms. This gives developers the intelligence necessary to make decisions on a scale and at a speed that was not previously possible, freeing up capital and labor to make the changes required to meet ESG targets. Audette’s goal is to push automation as far down this value chain as possible. Every dollar and hour that can be saved in finding solutions is a dollar and hour that can go to executing that solution, which will be invaluable in the push for decarbonization.

A key word for Audette is “intelligence.” They consider themselves to be a commercial real estate intelligence platform, and their goal is to get information to decision makers in a useful and expeditious manner. Although they set out to be a cheap and fast solution, they understand that there is no room for not getting it right. An intelligence platform adds no value if their intelligence is incorrect and does not tailor itself to the needs of the user. As such, users of Audette can expect personalized scenarios and solutions dependent on their priorities, with an unbeatable level of accuracy. Audette does this by using state-of-the-art models and constantly innovating their platform.

What Makes Audette a No Brainer?

Successful companies have a “No-Brainer” quality about them: whatever product or service they offer feels as if it would be unreasonable to not use. Great companies have this quality doubly from both the customer side and the labor side: being a part of the company should also feel like a no-brainer.

For their customers, commercial real estate developers, decarbonization is becoming an expectation of investors and other stakeholders. Making this change is a massive undertaking, as these developers operate on a huge scale. In order to meet these goals, decisions need to be made quickly, and resources need to be allocated towards making eco-friendly upgrades and executing sustainability-focused plans. Audette is how this can be done. By making the intelligence process cheaper, faster, and better, developers can make decisions fast and with confidence while saving resources to put towards executing these decisions. They can make real progress in hitting their ESG goals while increasing the long-run profitability of their portfolio.

For workers, they will find a place that, despite being a SaaS company, operates in a human-first manner. In building his company Naismith has operated around three cultural tenants: empathy, audacity, and accountability. The audacity component is pretty clear. There is an emphasis on speed and a constant, visionary feeling that they are building the future. These are both common characteristics of successful startups. For Naismith, empathy and accountability are about emphasizing the human element in building a company, especially one that aspires to have a global impact. Challenges and failures are realities of this pursuit and are handled with a sense of sympathy and responsibility, as are the amazing opportunities for success, curiosity, and innovation. Audette is powered by people, and those people are treated as such. It is a company for those who love to work in a fast and dynamic environment while having a hand in important, globally-impactful decision making.

Audette is working to alleviate real pain points in commercial real estate development while focusing on our sustainable future. They are pushing for a better world, constructing a system that works much better than the existing one, and creating value for their customers and everyone who cares about the planet.