Utopi and Chainels Integration: Putting Energy Data in the Hands of Residents
Residents living in build-to-rent homes make heating and energy decisions every day: adjusting a thermostat, opening a window, or running the heating overnight, generally without ever seeing what those choices actually cost in energy terms. Operators face a similar gap from the other side: they can see a building's overall performance, but not always how individual spaces contribute to the wider utility bill.
Utopi and Chainels have partnered to close that gap.
Bringing energy data into the resident experience
This integration connects The Utopi Platform's granular, room-level performance data with Chainels, the intelligent tenant operating system used across residential and BTR portfolios to manage the tenant lifecycle from signature to offboarding. Built through Utopi’s Open API, it gives clients a top-level view of energy performance across an entire asset, alongside a breakdown of how each resident space is consuming energy.
More importantly, this integration puts individual energy data into the hands of residents. Chainels' purpose-built utilities module turns Utopi intelligence's readings into simple, easy-to-read graphs, right in the app they use every day.
“This partnership is a strong example of what an open API is really for. Chainels already excel in the resident relationship, and we excel in granular, room-level building data. Bringing the two together means residents get something genuinely useful without operators having to introduce another platform.”
— Falk Bleyl, CTO and Co-Founder at Utopi
Clearer insights for clients and residents
For clients, that top-level view means less time reconciling data across systems and more clarity on where energy is being used well, and where it isn't, across a portfolio. For residents, it means being able to understand the environmental footprint of their own heating behaviours, in plain terms, inside the app they are already checking for collecting parcels, reporting maintenance issues and following community updates.
Getting that resident-facing layer right took careful engineering. The integration was built with data protection and data quality treated as design requirements from day one, alongside resident experience.
“We built this integration around three things: the data protection standards residents are entitled to expect, the accuracy and integrity of the data itself, and a genuinely comfortable resident experience. An open API only earns its place if what comes out the other end is data people can trust and actually understand.”
— Ross Gledhill, Director of Engineering at Utopi
“Energy is a good example of data that exists but rarely reaches the person whose behaviour it describes. Our job is putting that feedback where residents already are, next to their parcels and their rent. Data changes decisions when it shows up in daily life, and that is exactly what this integration with Utopi does.”
— Erwin Buckers, CEO of Chainels
What comes next
The first deployment is due to go live on a client site in London this September, giving residents the chance to see their own energy data sitting alongside the rest of their home life in a single app.
It also points to something bigger than one integration. Utopi's open API exists precisely so that granular asset performance data can move into the systems clients and residents already rely on, rather than changing workflows. Working with Chainels is a strong example of what that looks like in practice, and a step towards wider industry adoption of granular, real-time building data as standard, not a bonus feature.
To find out more about bringing the Utopi platform and the Chainels integration to your portfolio, get in touch with the team at www.utopi.co.uk. To see how Chainels unifies your building’s data into one intelligent TenantOS, visit getchainels.com/en.