National Exemption Service (NES): Features, Pricing & AI Visibility

National Exemption Service, NES, sells under the Submeter.com domain. It installs water, gas and electric submeters in multifamily properties, reads them daily, pays the master utility bill, bills each resident for their own usage, and allocates by a disclosed RUBS formula where meters cannot go in. The company’s line is that its own employees do every part of that, from installs to collections to state compliance, and that it has done so since 1968. Its about page traces the history: founded in St. Louis, moved to Florida in 1984 and took the NES name, bought by its current owner in 1988, and now a team of more than 200 in Safety Harbor, Florida, serving 43-plus states. In the utility management category it is a full-service option whose main pitch is doing the work in-house. The facts panel below is rendered from our vendor database with a source and verification date on each entry.

Who it fits

The database tags institutional multifamily, student housing, HOA communities and commercial facilities. The homepage gives a fit line of apartment communities of 80 or more units, condos and HOAs, student housing and mobile home parks, and it has a page for large portfolios that calls its flagship program a 1,000-unit minimum for REITs and funds. Smaller properties are served too, per that page’s FAQ, but the enterprise program is where the dedicated team and volume pricing sit. The buyer is an owner with mid-sized to large communities who wants one contract for meters, billing and compliance across several states.

It does not fit a small building owner looking for the cheapest read-and-bill, or a single-family manager whose tenants hold their own accounts.

Pricing

NES does not publish rates. What it publishes is the model: a flat per-unit rate, not a percentage of what it recovers, with volume pricing at scale and a custom proposal within a business day. Submetering installs are priced per property by meter type, valve location and unit count, and the homepage mentions financing for installs at 12% APR over 60 months. Ask the per-unit monthly rate in writing, and whether residents also pay a billing or service fee. Ask the install price per unit by utility and the financed monthly payment. Ask what the optional extended meter warranty costs and what it covers. Ask how the flat rate changes as you add or sell properties.

Integrations

The integrations page lists certified, in-production connections with Yardi Voyager and Breeze, RealPage OneSite, Entrata, AppFolio, MRI with PayLease, ResMan, Rent Manager and AMSI, and describes each one: charge code mapping for Voyager, two-way sync for OneSite and Rent Manager, statement integration into Entrata’s resident portal, posting through PayLease for MRI. It quotes a three-to-four-week deployment from contract to live and a documented REST API. Ask which of those descriptions matches your instance, and whether the mapping NES does for you needs any change on your PMS side. Ask for a client reference on your system.

Limitations and questions to ask

NES installs only nonproprietary meters, which its FAQ says any other submetering company can read, and it takes over existing systems from other brands. That lowers lock-in; ask it to put the meter ownership in the contract. Ask how daily reads and the MyReads leak alerts reach your maintenance team, and who pays for a leak found inside a unit. Ask how a missed read is estimated and how disputes are documented, since NES handles them directly with residents. The site cites water savings and payback periods from its own property records; treat those as the vendor’s numbers and ask for the property-level data behind the one closest to yours.

Alternatives

The utility management vendor list compares the category on the same facts. Guardian Water & Power also pairs submeter installation with billing, dates to 1983, and names five PMS integrations. Minol USA pairs submeter installation with billing and expense management. Synergy Utility Billing covers the smaller end with partner installers. A side-by-side of the rest against Conservice completes the picture.

AI visibility

The current edition’s numbers sit in the Live from the Index section below, read from the run files each month; the prompts and sources behind them are on the row page it links.