Your Wi-Fi already knows which rooms are empty. beQ makes it visible.
An office building on a Tuesday, 10 a.m.
Every room is heated to 70°F. The ventilation is running. The hallway lights are on.
Half the offices are empty.
This isn't an isolated case. It's everyday reality in German buildings. And that is exactly where the new law comes in.
What changes with the Building Modernization Act
On July 29, 2026, the Building Modernization Act (Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz, GModG) replaced Germany's previous Building Energy Act. The headlines focused mostly on heating systems: the 65 percent renewable rule is gone.
For commercial real estate, the more important change is somewhere else. It concerns building automation in non-residential buildings.
More buildings affected: Until now, the building automation requirements applied to systems with a rated output above 290 kilowatts. The threshold is now just over 70 kilowatts.
A clear deadline: Existing buildings must be retrofitted by the end of 2029.
More than controls: The law also requires monitoring, analysis, and an assessment of efficiency.
More stages ahead: Starting in 2030 and 2033, stricter requirements will be phased in for the least efficient non-residential buildings.
That means far more offices, hotels, medical practices, retail locations, and administrative buildings fall under the rules than before. Your energy consultant can tell you whether your building is one of them.
Automation needs data. One piece is almost always missing.
A modern building knows a lot. The thermostats know the temperature. The meters know the consumption. The access control system knows who entered the building this morning.
What almost no building knows: whether anyone is in a given room right now.
That's why many systems still run on fixed schedules. Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., no matter who actually shows up. That worked as long as everyone came to the office every day.
Those days are over. According to an ifo Institute survey, more than a quarter of companies in Germany say their office space is underused. Remote work is one of the main reasons.
If you heat by schedule, you're heating for people who never come in.
Why cameras and motion sensors fall short
The obvious answer would be a camera in every room. In practice, that fails on three counts: privacy, acceptance among your team, and the cost of installation and operation.
Conventional occupancy sensors are the most common alternative. But they need a clear line of sight, have to be installed room by room, and often detect only movement. Sit still at your desk long enough and the lights go out.
What beQ does differently
beQ uses something almost every building already has: Wi-Fi.
People change the radio signals in a room simply by moving through it. The beQ Hub analyzes these changes and shows them as a heatmap on your floor plan. Even through walls, with no camera, no image, and no face.
That makes visible what no one could measure before:
which floors are barely used on which days
which meeting rooms are booked but empty
when a building actually fills up in the morning and empties out at night
This is exactly the data that shows where demand-based control can start. Instead of heating by the calendar, the building responds to how it's actually used.
What this means for you
The end of 2029 sounds far away. It isn't. If you want to plan your building automation the right way, you need reliable usage data first. And that data doesn't appear overnight.
Three questions to ask yourself now:
Is my building's system output above 70 kilowatts?
Do I know how much my space is actually being used?
Am I running my building on real data or on assumptions?
If you hesitate on questions 2 and 3, you're not alone. But you should change that before the deadline forces you to.
Your next step
Stop heating empty rooms.
The beQ Hub is running as a prototype, and we're looking for pilot partners who want to be the first to make their buildings visible. Bring your floor plan, and together we'll see whether deploying beQ makes sense for you.
Book a personal conversation with beQ.
Note: This article does not constitute legal or energy consulting advice.
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