Press releases

Legal & General appoints tech startup to boost performance in commercial buildings

LGIM Real Assets (Legal & General) announces that it has appointed award-winning tech startup Demand Logic to monitor and enhance building performance across its property portfolio.

5 Feb 2020


Full press release

Demand Logic’s cloud-based software provides real-time intelligence to property stakeholders, helping improve productivity, save energy, identify faults and increase comfort and wellbeing among occupants. Whereas previously performance data would be visible only to a building management systems’ (BMS) engineer, Demand Logic’s software creates an online forum for over 50 potential users, including asset managers, property managers and facilities managers, allowing issues to be addressed quickly and efficiently.

Change in regulation, consumer choice, employee expectations and an exponential growth in prop- tech have promoted facilities management to a major boardroom-level issue, with employers now more concerned than ever about how workers experience their office environments.

Legal & General has been challenging convention that the real estate sector is slow to adopt new technologies and, among a boom in new tools and practices, is making sustained efforts to remove communication barriers and increase engagement with its occupants. The company has made a major push towards making its commercial property more responsive to occupants’ needs, two years ago introducing ‘Capsule’, a flexible leasing initiative which allows quick move-in and short-term occupancies, and trialling the use of big data on its building assets to enable better decision making and support growth.

Demand Logic’s software has been deployed across seven of LGIM’s commercial buildings and will be rolled across a number of other properties within the portfolio. Since June last year Demand Logic, working with LGIM and its partners, has implemented 300 actions based on the software’s findings, resulting in 1,547,826 KwH (£180,000 per year and a 400-tonne carbon saving) of potential energy avoidance across the seven properties.

Legal & General has successfully met targets to cut carbon emissions from its commercial property assets by 20% compared to 2010 levels. Last year the group announced that it would look beyond current legislation and practices, seeking to align its real estate portfolio with a science-based carbon performance target covering the period to 2030.

Demand Logic’s software was developed with support from Innovate UK, a government agency set up to drive innovations in science and technology, and has won prestigious awards at the EG Tech Awards and the Building Controls Industry Association Awards.

Mark Tyson, Head of Property Operations at LGIM RAP: "Demand Logic is a key part of our wider strategy to be the owner of choice for occupiers. Initially across our office portfolio the Demand Logic tools have built a unifying platform for our Property & Facilities Managers, Technical Consultants and M&E service providers. This enables them to collaborate and ensure the best outcome for our occupiers with a mixture of day-to-day actions on comfort, energy reduction measures and longer-term HVAC plant & equipment replacement decisions."
Mike Darby, CEO & Co-Founder, Demand Logic: "Demand Logic is delighted to be extending our partnership with such a prestigious brand, like LGIM RA. We have achieved some very effective results working together already. We are excited to see how much value we can create as part of this extended partnership. LGIM’s experience and their innovative, customer-centric approach is something which we want to build upon to develop our offering and further support LGIM and their clients."

Notes to editors

Established in 1836, Legal & General is one of the UK's leading financial services groups and a major global investor, with £1.2 trillion in total assets under management1 of which 40% is international. We have a unique and highly synergistic business model, which continues to drive strong returns. Legal & General provides powerful asset origination and management capabilities directly to clients, which also underpin our leading retirement and protection solutions. We are a leading international player in Pension Risk Transfer, in UK and US life insurance, and in UK workplace pensions and retirement income. Our purpose is to improve the lives of our customers and create value for our shareholders. Through inclusive capitalism, we are investing in long-term assets, such as real estate and infrastructure, that can help build a better society for the future.

1Data as at 31 December 2023.

LGIM is one of Europe’s largest asset managers and a major global investor, with total assets under management of £1.2 trillion1 ($1.5tn, €1.3tn, CHF 1.2tn). We work with a wide range of global clients, including pension schemes, sovereign wealth funds, fund distributors and retail investors.

For more than 50 years, we have built our business through understanding what matters most to our clients and transforming this insight into valuable, accessible investment products and solutions. We provide investment expertise across the full spectrum of asset classes including fixed income, equities, commercial property, and cash. Our capabilities range from index-tracking and active strategies to liquidity management and liability-based risk management solutions.

1Data as at 31 December 2023. Data combines assets under management by LGIM in the UK, LGIMA in the US and LGIM Asia in Hong Kong. Assets under management include securities and derivatives positions.