The vanguard of commercial real estate today is the Greening existing buildings to decrease energy use, reduce operating expenses and attract tenants.

The purpose of this writing is to provide a step by step strategy for pursuing the Greening of an existing building.

LEED EB as the Standard

All occupied buildings can be Greened and be made to be more sustainable, but all of those buildings may not be ideal candidates for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Existing Buildings: Operation & Maintenance (LEED EB)® certification. That acknowledged, given the broad market acceptance of LEED, as the third party certification standard of choice, this writing will describe a strategy for Greening a building and pursuing LEED EB certification.

LEED EB is a standard for the ongoing operations and maintenance of existing non-residential buildings. The certification standard identifies and rewards current best practices and provides a checklist for buildings to reduce costs associated with building operations, reduce environmental impacts, create healthier and more productive employee workspaces, and provide public recognition for leadership in sustainability.

While the LEED for New Construction and Core & Shell rating standards focus on the new construction or major renovation of a building, LEED EB is to certify the operations and maintenance of the building and create a plan for ensuring high performance over time. The rating standard captures both a building’s physical systems (lighting, HVAC, equipment, etc.) and the way the building is occupied and operated by its managers (waste management, temperature monitoring, commuting programs, etc.).

Is it Feasible?

This step by step strategy presupposes that an owner has determined to pursue LEED EB certification. However, as noted above, not all buildings are ideal candidates for that USGBC certification and recognizing that commercial buildings are not homogenous, as a preliminary matter it is highly recommended that a feasibility study be undertaken.

A feasibility study is best conducted by a third party Green building consultant, as few owners have that expertise in house. The consultant will ideally be expert in matters of commercial real estate, sustainability, environmental design, energy services, and have experience in LEED registration.

At its roots the feasibility study is a factual investigation sufficiently detailed to make a determination that the building can satisfy the LEED Minimum Program Requirements and satisfy each of the Prerequisites in the LEED EB standard. While all Minimums and Prerequisites must be satisfied, it is often the “minimum energy efficiency performance” requirements of Energy & Atmosphere Prerequisite 2 that can be most burdensome. If using a full 12 months of continuously measured energy data, the building can not achieve an energy performance rating, using the EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager, of at least a 69, reducing that ‘excessive energy use’ may be costly for a small or modest size building .

Also appreciate that LEED EB applies only to whole buildings and such may present particular challenges to multi tenant buildings where tenants are not obligated by existing lease requirements to cooperate in the LEED EB processes. Such is an important component of the study.

With the timely participation by the owner, a feasibility study can be accomplished in a matter of weeks including a recommendation of whether the Greening of the building should culminate with a LEED EB registration.

The Sustainability Team

As an owner determines to pursue LEED EB certification, the threshold consideration is assembling a project team. It is of paramount import that the owner participates as an active team member. The owner should be buttressed and advised by a creative and innovative Green building consultant or consultants. While there are more than 130,000 LEED Accredited Professionals, few of those are expert and have ‘real world’ experience in commercial real estate, sustainability, environmental design, energy services, and communication. Other project team members may include the property manager, site and grounds manager, custodial manager, building engineer, commissioning agent, HVAC mechanic, procurement personnel, leasing representative, and others familiar with the building features, systems and processes.

The number of team members will vary depending upon the size and scope of the project, but the team must include all of those necessary to assess and quantify the costs and benefits of potential actions for enhancing energy and sustainability at the building. That assessment is made more involved in a multi tenant building where it ranges from a review of existing leases (including not only obligations for cooperating in a Green effort, but including sharing economic costs and benefits, and even scheduled tenant turnover) to assessing HVAC equipment (including specifically its energy metrics).

Today there is even commercially available software, including LoraxPRO®, to guide an owner in this process.

An Analytical Process

At the opening bell of this multi step strategy, project goals need to be established and the anticipated role of each team participant needs to be agreed upon. Goals may include: creating a replicable model for Greening each of the buildings in the owner’s portfolio; lowering energy consumption costs by at least 20 percent; developing a Green real estate product that is marketable to existing and prospective tenants; coordinating this Greening project with ongoing scheduled capital projects in the building; and preparing a budget that is efficacious and achievable.

A project mission statement, articulating the owner’s goals, should be created such that during any value engineering considerations, specific actions can be measured against that mission. Very different actions may be desirable if owner’s goal is protecting the ecology of an adjacent water course versus lowering energy consumption cost versus being able to competitively market and lease Green office space.

The Kick-Off Charrette

Collaboration is important among team members. After a kickoff charrette, team meetings can be supplemented with a Sharepoint® site for the project, biweekly conference calls, and not less than weekly email reports.

The comparative process of determining the building’s current status along with the development of actions that can be feasibly implemented in order to achieve increasing levels of LEED certification can be called LEED Gap Analysis. The team should establish an aim that is often to target LEED EB Gold certification.

Often, beginning with the report of the feasibility study, the team should conduct a review of the building mechanical systems and equipment, calculating energy usage, and developing a baseline energy benchmark report and a preliminary system for measuring energy efficiency.

Feedback needs to be obtained from building stakeholders, including a tenant sustainability charrette to both obtain an assessment of tenant green goals and wishes and tenant buy in.

The owner should immediately begin changes to building operations that are visible, including a recycling effort involving all stakeholders, signage describing the no smoking policy, Hybrid car parking spaces, etc.

The Gap analysis should be ongoing to determine which LEED credits the building was already achieving and which could be achieved feasibly. Create and share a scorecard using the LEED EB Checklist.

The process of value engineering existing capital projects should be a high priority for the project team as away to avoid having to make changes later. It may be desirable to puts some existing projects on hold. And ideally, some of the ongoing projects will see cost reductions by following sustainable strategies.

All of the above will ideally be assembled into a single writing shared and commented on by all on the team; and then, as appropriate, to stakeholders.

The Planning & Development Charrette

That writing and the feedback received make the perfect starting point for the next step in the strategy, a planning and development charrette. An overarching goal of this step is to create a “360 degree” understanding of resource use at the building. An understanding of the whole building systems and processes is necessary to begin development of energy efficiency measures and the Greening plan in general. The second goal of this step is a brainstorming session, where many possible actions (both good and bad) are compiled and each vetted and weighted against other possible actions (including for example, giving extra weight to LEED Regional Credits).

Design Charrette

With all of the compiled possible actions overlaid on the background and understanding of the existing building, the strategy continues with a design charrette (the 3rd and final charrette for most projects), with all on the team in attendance as the most efficient approach to organizing the Greening effort into a plan of specific actions. (In a recent project the more than 60 brainstormed possible actions were reduced to 8 actions proposed in the plan.)

In that process of designing activities, as an alternative to simply using the credit categories on the LEED checklist, many teams find it useful to regroup the credits according to functional characteristics. This alternative organization, actually suggested by USGBC, may offer a more intuitive division of actions and responsibility among team members:

a. An alternative regrouping might commence with materials “in” credits associated with the prerequisite of planning and executing a sustainable purchasing policy. This group of credits includes the purchase of sustainable items (i.e., ongoing consumables, durable goods, facility alterations, light bulbs, and food).

b. A second group could be materials “out” credits that drive the prerequisite of a solid waste management policy.

c. Administration credits can be grouped, including conducting surveys to ensure occupant comfort, providing alternative transportation, documenting sustainable building cost impacts, involving a LEED Accredited Professional, and more.

d. The grouping a Green cleaning credits to satisfy that prerequisite also flows, including not only the purchase of sustainable cleaning products, but also an assessment of custodial effectiveness.

e. Site management credits are a good grouping involving building maintenance and grounds keeping staff. These credits, including building exterior and hardscape maintenance, pest control, water efficient landscaping methods, effective storm water management, protection of open spaces, etc. are largely written plan driven.

f. Occupant health and productivity credits involve thermal comfort monitoring, increased ventilation, occupant controlled lighting and indoor air quality make a natural grouping.

g. A group of energy metrics focusing on measurement of refrigerant management, emission reduction and optimizing energy performance, also makes sense.

h. Operational effectiveness credits begin with the prerequisites for energy and water consumption and also involve building commissioning, use of the building automation system, metering energy usage, and tracking water consumption and are a natural last grouping.

After the compilations of likely actions to satisfy each credit are articulated, the next step in the strategy is to design a Performance Period not less than 3 months or longer than 24 months. The importance of this step should not be overlooked. The design of the Performance Period becomes the plan for implementing each of the actions toward Greening the building.

Implementation

The next step in the strategy is to implement the plan. If the schedule for implementation is longer than 24 months, the date of registration of the LEED EB project with GBCI will have to be timed to not exceed that maximum permitted period for the performance period.

Among the goals of implementation is to minimize existing tenants and building occupants. This goal is concomitant with attracting new tenants, including by describing the Greening of the existing building in marketing materials.

The registration and application for LEED EB certification is not the end of the process. GBCI will all but certainly query and ask for clarification of components of the registration.

Sustainability training will likely be ongoing during this period, educating building personnel, tenants, leasing agents and a host of other key players in the ongoing sustainable operation of the building.

Additionally, the final step in the strategy, will likely already be in process at this point in time, that is, planning for the future and LEED EB recertification. While recertification is mandated by USGBC for EB buildings, such is not a certainty and it is quite possible (for a host of reasons beyond the scope of this writing) that many buildings certified will not easily be recertified.

Conclusion

The Wall Street Journal recently reported, through the first quarter of 2009, “buildings rated by the LEED program have consistently had higher rents and occupancy rates” ..

It is time to Green your existing building. It is time to seek LEED EB certification.

It is time to get started. Assemble the very best team of creative consultants experienced in the innovation and application of new concepts and techniques in Green building. And be at the vanguard of decreasing energy use, reducing operating expenses and attracting tenants.

If we can be of assistance give Stuart Kaplow a call.