Harrison Street Real Estate

The Client.

Utopi is a global PropTech and Data solutions company, operating across 13 countries and monitoring more than 80,000 beds. While much of the conversation in the student accommodation sector is still centred on the UK market, this case study tells a different story – one that stretches from Pamplona to Barcelona, from Salamanca to Madrid and Oviedo.

Harrison Street Real Estate is one of the leading real estate investment management firms focused on alternative real assets, with a significant and growing portfolio of Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) across Europe. In Spain, that portfolio spans 9 assets across 5 cities – with Utopi installed in those 2,000+ student beds.

This project was delivered in partnership with DLC Europe, development management and ESG experts operating across Europe, who served as Property Consultants, ensuring seamless delivery and alignment between investment strategy and operational reality on the ground.

The Challenge.

Managing a multi-asset PBSA portfolio across several Spanish cities presents a unique set of operational and environmental challenges — particularly when it comes to energy management strategies. Unlike the predominantly heated UK market, student accommodation in Spain must contend with seasonal variation: buildings consume energy both in winter for heating, and in summer when air conditioning runs continuously to combat the heat.

For Investment experts like Harrison Street, this dual-season energy demand creates real complexity. Without granular, room-level visibility, it is virtually impossible to understand whether HVAC systems are performing efficiently, where consumption is being wasted, or whether solar panel generation is genuinely offsetting load at the asset level. Due diligence processes and investor reporting are similarly constrained when only building-level or portfolio-level data is available.

The question Harrison Street needed answered was straightforward: across 9 assets in 5 Spanish cities, how do you get consistent, real-time, actionable data — at the room level — to empower your asset management teams and satisfy investor-grade reporting requirements?

Our Approach.

Working closely with DLC Europe, Utopi developed a consistent data infrastructure across all 9 Spanish assets — each monitored at the room level, in real time, through The Utopi Platform.

A critical element of our approach was ensuring that our solution worked effectively within air-conditioned buildings. Our Utopi Multisensors and smart meter infrastructure are equally suited to tracking cooling performance, so when configured were able to give Harrison Street full visibility over HVAC behaviour throughout the year, regardless of season.

We also integrated monitoring of solar panel generation across relevant assets — ensuring that renewable energy contribution could be measured against actual consumption, giving asset managers a true picture of net energy performance rather than a partial view.

Where We Operate.

The Harrison Street Spain portfolio spans some of the most dynamic student markets in Europe. Utopi is active across all of them:

• Pamplona — Home to the University of Navarra, one of Spain’s leading research institutions.
• Salamanca — A UNESCO World Heritage city and one of Europe’s oldest university towns.
• Madrid — Spain’s capital and a major hub for domestic and international students.
• Barcelona — A globally ranked city for student life and institutional real estate investment.
• Oviedo — A growing student city in northern Spain with strong regional university presence.

This geographic spread underlines a key point: Utopi is not a UK-only solution. Our platform is built to operate consistently across different markets, regulatory environments, and building typologies — giving institutions the confidence to deploy a single monitoring standard across an international portfolio.

Key Capabilities Unlocked.

• Due Diligence: For institutional investors, data integrity at the point of acquisition and throughout the hold period is non-negotiable. Utopi’s room-level monitoring provides Harrison Street with the kind of granular, independently verifiable data that supports investment committee decisions, lender requirements, and ESG fund reporting. Rather than relying on estimated or aggregated figures, asset managers have access to real consumption and environmental data at the room level — across every asset, every day.
• Asset Performance: Understanding how a building performs — not just at the meter, but inside every room — is the foundation of effective asset management. Utopi empowers Harrison Street’s teams to identify underperforming spaces, monitor occupancy-related energy patterns, and benchmark performance across assets in different cities and climates. This visibility translates directly into more informed decisions around operational expenditure, capex planning, and exit strategy.
• Energy Usage in Buildings at Scale: Managing energy across 9 assets in 5 cities is not a small undertaking. The Utopi Platform aggregates data at scale, enabling Harrison Street’s asset management team and operations team to monitor energy usage patterns across the entire Spanish portfolio from a single dashboard — while retaining the ability to drill down to individual rooms when needed. This scalability is what makes Utopi uniquely suited to institutional portfolios: the same granularity, replicated consistently, wherever the assets sit.
• Solar Panel Integration: Several assets within the portfolio benefit from solar generation. Utopi’s monitoring infrastructure captures solar output alongside consumption data, allowing teams to assess the real contribution of on-site renewables — and identify when and where grid dependency remains high. This is particularly valuable in Spain, where solar irradiance is strong year-round and maximising renewable self-consumption is both an environmental and a financial priority.
• HVAC Optimisation in Air-Conditioned Assets: Student accommodation in Spain faces an energy challenge that does not feature in most UK case studies: buildings are energy-intensive in both directions. In winter, heating systems carry the load. In summer, air conditioning becomes the dominant consumer — and in cities like Madrid or Seville, the summer cooling season is long and intense.

Utopi’s room-level sensors provide Harrison Street with continuous insight into HVAC performance across this dual-season demand curve. By understanding actual temperatures inside occupied and unoccupied rooms, teams can identify where systems are working harder than necessary, where setpoints are misconfigured, and where resident behaviour is contributing to overconsumption. The result is a data-led approach to HVAC optimisation that improves both energy efficiency and occupant comfort — without the guesswork.

The Partnership.

This project is a strong example of what is possible when the right partners work in alignment. DLC Europe brought deep expertise in on-the-ground project coordination — ensuring that Utopi’s technology was deployed efficiently across all 9 assets, with minimal disruption and maximum speed to insight. Their role as Property Consultant was instrumental in bridging the gap between investment intent and operational delivery.

For Utopi, this engagement is part of a broader story of international growth. We are active across 13 countries, monitoring environments from the UK to Spain, Scandinavia to Australia — and the Harrison Street portfolio in Spain is one of the clearest demonstrations of what room-level data infrastructure looks like when deployed at institutional scale, across an active European portfolio.