Page 12
— Property Management Quarterly — November 2015
A
topic that comes up in our
LEED Green Associate class
is that LEED was created
by the U.S. Green Building
Council to recognize the
top 25 percent of buildings in the
market – yet less than 1 percent of
office buildings in the U.S. are LEED
certified. Why is this?
Let’s start with what we know.
LEED “encourages and accelerates
adoption of sustainable build-
ing and community development
practices through the creation and
implementation of a green building
benchmark that is voluntary, con-
sensus based and market driven,”
according to the USGBC’s Core Con-
cepts Guide.
LEED is absolutely market driven.
The 2015 Green Building Adoption
Index, a study completed by CBRE
and Maastricht University on the 30
largest office markets, found that
5.32 percent of the buildings (20.29
percent of the square footage) were
LEED certified by the end of 2014,
an uptick from 5.1 percent at the
end of 2013. This is due largely to
increases in existing building certi-
fications.
The trend continues to be focused
on larger buildings near the urban
center. According to the study, “In
the 10 largest markets, 62.3 percent
of the buildings larger than 500,000
square feet, encompassing 76 per-
cent of all space, are certified.”
There are three conclusions to be
drawn from this study. First, LEED is
very much market driven. In cities
without large market penetration,
the number of LEED certified build-
ings continues to be much lower
than the findings
in the cities in this
study. This doesn’t
mean that owners
and managers are
not implement-
ing sustainable
practices – they are
– but often they
are not willing to
pay for the cost of
certification unless
it is dictated by
competition in the
marketplace.
The second con-
clusion is cost.
LEED is a complex
third-party certifi-
cation system. There is an extensive
amount of documentation, which
leads most projects to use a consul-
tant to take on the burden of that
work and complete the documenta-
tion correctly. Now the building is
subject to the ability of said con-
sultant to obtain the certification
cost-effectively. Things don’t always
play out that way, sometimes based
on the experience level of the con-
sultant or his expertise with the
particular LEED rating system being
used.
When the consulting fees, regis-
tration and certification fees from
the USGBC, potential retrocommis-
sioning costs and building improve-
ments are added up, it is easy for
the total project cost to be any-
where from $60,000 to $120,000, or
even more if substantial plumbing
retrofits are required in older build-
ings. So, if the cost of certification
is broken down by square footage, it
is easy to see how larger buildings
have an easier time taking on that
cost. When those factors are consid-
ered, it is easier to understand why
only approximately 25,000 buildings
are certified in the U.S.
What’s been left out are most
small offices (80 percent of com-
mercial buildings in the U.S. are less
than 100,000 square feet in area
and 50 percent are less than 50,000
sf); K-12 schools, most university
buildings (other than policy-driven
projects such as at the University of
Washington); and almost all retail
stores, health care facilities and the
like, according to Jerry Yudelson of
the Green Building Initiative, which
is a competitor of the USGBC. “Col-
lectively, these represent most of
the U.S. commercial building stock,”
he said.
As Yudelson goes on to point out,
it is difficult to measure some of
the benefits of green building cer-
tification, especially the benefits
occupants may care about most,
such as productivity and increased
health. It is easy to measure year-
over-year energy improvements off
of the utility bills, but no simple
way to measure the impact green
building certification has had on its
occupants.
Finally, the average person still
doesn’t understand what LEED is. If
you ask someone what an organic
Sustainability
Amanda
Timmons,
LEED AP
Member,
sustainable
specialist, Ampajen
Solutions LLC,
Denver
