After a summer of tumultuous and severe weather events that wreaked havoc on the Caribbean and the Southern United States, a certain segment of real estate and property managers still doesn’t see the value of incorporating resilience into their buildings or their operations.
That’s one of the key findings in Structure Tone’s second-annual Client Sustainability Report. The construction management firm polled a select group of 140 senior corporate real estate and facilities management professionals to gauge where sustainability comes into play for end users across the commercial real estate community.
Based on their responses, it would appear that “green building” is now mainstream. None of the respondents consider it a fad. More than three-fifths—62%—see LEED certification as a market differentiator, up nine percentage points from last year’s survey. And more than half of those polled agree that employees expect the buildings they work in to be LEED-certified.
Indeed, 45% of those polled said they would pay more to lease space in a green building. And 42% expressed concern about where their buildings rank in public energy disclosers.
“Last year there was a concern that when LEEDv4, a more stringent version of LEED, was implemented, many owners would simply stop pursuing certification. But our results show that’s simply not the case,” says Jennifer Taranto, LEED AP ID+C/BD+C, WELL AP, Structure Tone’s director of Sustainability.
Sustainability is becoming mainstream, and LEED certification is still the gold standard in commercial real estate, according to Structure Tone's survey. Image: Structure Tone.
That being said, the No. 1 barrier to building green remains its cost for an overwhelming number of those polled. And there are still limits to how green the real estate and property management communities want to take their buildings. Only 11% of the survey respondents said their companies have policies that support progress toward Net-Zero Energy in the building sector. This is a slight downward movement from the previous year of 15%. “Surprisingly, 31% of respondents did not know if they have real estate in cities that have community-wide Net Zero goals,” Structure Tone reports.
Cost might also explain why the number of respondents who think resilience is important fell to 54%, from 61% last year. And 17% fewer respondents said they are seeking resilience expertise on their projects. (The survey was open to responses from March 1 through June 19, just months before Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria did their damage, and an 8.1-magnitude earthquake rocked Mexico City.)
Taranto tells BD+C that she was “surprised” by the lower responses about resilience. However, she also notes that the survey is in line with attitudes Structure Tone continues to encounter in the field from some clients that have yet to give resilience closer scrutiny.
Conversely, more real estate and property management professionals are embracing wellness as a standard for their buildings to pursue. More than 80% of those polled cited wellness as a relevant factor in recruiting and retaining employees. More than half of the respondents said they planned to seek expertise to devise wellness strategies for their buildings.
“Wellness is certainly coming to the forefront,” says Taranto.
Leading this charge is the International WELL Building Institute, which has developed wellness standards for buildings and communities. Water Street Tampa—a $3 billion mixed-use district under construction in Florida that BD+C reports on in a feature article about resilience in our October 2017 issue—on September 5 launched a pilot of the WELL Community Standard. This project, which when completed will have more than 9 million sf of commercial and residential space, is targeting to be the world’s first WELL-certified community.
One-quarter of respondents to Structure Tone’s survey said they were looking to do a WELL project within the next year.
In Structure Tone’s survey, 70% of the respondents work at companies with more than 1,000 employees. Two-thirds of those polled have square footage responsibilities that exceed 1 million sf. The top sector responses came from commercial office, data centers, healthcare, and pharma/life sciences.
Related Stories
| Oct 14, 2013
Computer simulation aids design of Vermont ski area net-zero lodge and fitness center
The Craftsbury (Vermont) Outdoor Center has broken ground on a new activity lodge and fitness center. An energy modeling computer simulation was used to optimize solar orientation, insulation values, and the form of the building.
| Oct 10, 2013
Carnegie Mellon study looks at impact of dashboards on energy consumption
A recent study by Carnegie Mellon took a look at the impact of providing feedback in an energy dashboard form to workers and studying how it impacted overall energy consumption.
| Oct 7, 2013
Geothermal system, energy-efficient elevator are key elements in first net-zero public high school in Rhode Island
The school will employ a geothermal system to heat and cool a portion of the building. Other energy-saving measures will include LED lighting, room occupancy sensors, and an energy-efficient elevator.
| Oct 4, 2013
Sydney to get world's tallest 'living' façade
The One Central Park Tower development consists of two, 380-foot-tall towers covered in a series of living walls and vertical gardens that will extend the full height of the buildings.
| Sep 30, 2013
Smart building systems key to new Wisconsin general aviation terminal’s net zero target
The Outagamie County Regional Airport’s new 8,000 sf general aviation terminal was designed to achieve net zero.
| Sep 26, 2013
Sheep's wool insulation, bio-brick among Cradle to Cradle product innovation finalists
Ten finalists are competing for $250,000 in prizes from the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and Make It Right.
| Sep 24, 2013
8 grand green roofs (and walls)
A dramatic interior green wall at Drexel University and a massive, 4.4-acre vegetated roof at the Kauffman Performing Arts Center in Kansas City are among the projects honored in the 2013 Green Roof and Wall Awards of Excellence.
| Sep 23, 2013
After retrofit and PV array project, N.Y. beverage distributor gets to net-zero
Queens, N.Y.-based beverage distributor Big Geyser’s energy efficiency retrofit project and rooftop solar array installation have positioned the company’s facility to achieve net-zero power.
| Sep 19, 2013
What we can learn from the world’s greenest buildings
Renowned green building author, Jerry Yudelson, offers five valuable lessons for designers, contractors, and building owners, based on a study of 55 high-performance projects from around the world.
| Sep 16, 2013
Passive solar, enhanced envelope crucial to Univ. of Illinois net-zero project
Passive solar strategies and an enhanced envelope are keys to achieving net-zero on the new 230,000 sf Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering building at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
