Any real estate organisation that starts looking for a partner to collect energy data across a European portfolio will quickly notice that everyone says the same thing. Pan-European coverage. High-quality data. Seamless integration. The promises are easy to make. What separates one provider from another only becomes visible once you ask the right questions, point by point.

1. Pan-European experience

The starting point is whether a provider has genuinely worked at the scale your portfolio requires. "A large pan-European real estate party with more than 250 locations across more than 5 countries is a reasonable quantitative definition of scale," says Benno Schwarz, Head of Growth at Hello Energy. If a provider's largest reference project covers a handful of countries and a few dozen buildings, a portfolio spanning fifteen countries is a different proposition entirely.

Ask for their largest reference project: how many countries, how many locations, and for how long.

2. Knowledge of local markets

Coverage on a map is not the same as understanding how data access actually works in a given country. This point is about whether a provider knows the relevant network operators, the local regulation, and the practical steps required, market by market, rather than treating Europe as one uniform process.

Ask them to name the relevant network operators in two or three of your countries, and what the process looks like there.

3. Actual data connections and local partners

The third point is whether local market knowledge translates into something concrete: data connections and partners that are already operating in those markets, rather than a plan to build them. A provider can describe a country in detail without having ever collected data there.

Ask whether they have collected data in that country before, or whether this would be a first.

4. Operational digital connections

This is where the gap between providers tends to become visible. Many parties can claim digital connections to smart meters. Far fewer can demonstrate that those connections are operational, at scale, across the markets that matter.

A recent project in Germany illustrates the difference. One provider was able to offer a direct connection through an existing smart meter for around €500. A competing offer, from a provider without that digital connection, relied on installing a datalogger instead. "A datalogger alone costs around €200 to purchase," says Hello Energy Managing Director Kees van Alphen. "Add a margin, installation on site, and you are looking at €750 to €850 in the most favourable scenario. And a datalogger is less reliable than a direct connection to the official metering company, which is legally required to be present."

The practical question to ask a potential partner is specific: what is your core coverage, what is your extended coverage, and what can you guarantee? A provider working in the five largest European markets should be able to state, for example, that where a smart meter is present, they can retrieve data directly in a defined share of cases, not as an aspiration but as a guarantee.

5. A local network of installers and partners

Digital connections cover a large share of cases, but not all of them. Not every building has a smart meter, and someone has to be able to go on site when one is needed, in the local language. "You always need a local party for certain countries," says Van Alphen. "In Germany, in France, in Spain, language and local presence are often an underestimated issue."

Ask who would physically visit a site in, say, Poland or Italy, and in what language.

6. A certified hardware partner network with an SLA

Beyond having local installers, this point is about whether that network operates under a defined service level agreement. A provider without this falls back to ad hoc arrangements, which becomes a problem for the buildings where digital access does not work, a meaningful share in many portfolios.

Ask what the response time is if a datalogger fails, and what the agreement with that hardware partner actually says.

7. Own software with standardisation and API access

This point concerns what happens to the data after it has been collected. A provider needs its own software capable of standardising data from different countries and formats, and making it available through an API, rather than delivering raw exports that still need to be reconciled manually.

Ask to see what the output looks like: one standardised format, or a folder of country-specific files.

8. Continuous monitoring and dedicated support

Data collection is not a one-off project. Connections break, authorisations expire, and meters get replaced. This final point is about whether a provider runs 24/7 checks on whether data is still coming in, and has a team responsible for resolving it when it is not.

Ask what happens, concretely, on day eight if a data stream has been silent for a week.

What a complete answer looks like

These eight points are not equally difficult to satisfy. Scale and experience are relatively easy to claim. Operational digital connections, a certified hardware network and continuous monitoring are where the differences between providers tend to be real.

A provider that can speak to all eight points with specific, verifiable details, rather than general assurances, is a provider that has genuinely worked through the complexity of pan-European data collection. Asking for specifics on each point, country by country, turns a comparison between promises into a comparison between what each provider can demonstrate.

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This article is part of a series in which Kees van Alphen and Benno Schwarz share what ten years of European energy data collection has taught them.

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