Claire Woolley

As a sign of the times, more and more commercial office tenants are looking for ways to make their business operations more resource efficient. Those finding success will commonly create a sustainability plan that starts with the "low-hanging fruit." It's easiest to start with low- or no-cost initiatives, such as paper reduction and energy conservation measures that produce the greatest cost savings and effect on environmental impacts. Underpinning such initiatives should be a robust measuring and monitoring regime.

Starting with initiatives that get tangible and easily achievable results can create the necessary momentum for further, more advanced sustainable business initiatives. For commercial office tenants, such initiatives often focus on energy efficiency, recycling and indoor air quality issues.

However, tackling such initiatives, for the large part, requires working with landlords, which can sometimes be problematic. Achieving desired outcomes can simply start with a tenant actively forming a better, more collaborative relationship with a landlord. Moreover, with the slacking real estate market, landlords are more likely to act on tenants’ requests for greener building operations, such as expanded recycling programs (e.g. plastic and aluminum collections) and also “green cleaning”.

Worth the investment

In terms of energy efficiency, tenants should know that landlords are more often than not just as interested in reducing energy costs as their tenants are. Energy efficiency is fast becoming a key strategy in corporate America because it delivers many real benefits, such as lower lifecycle operation cost, increased building functionality and higher comfort level for occupants. There is also increasingly hard data on the excellent return on investment (ROIs) and increases in asset values associated with green buildings.

For example, an often cited study by CoStar Group released in 2008 reports that green buildings outperform conventional buildings in terms of occupancy, sale price and rental rates, sometimes by significant margins. Specifically, the CoStar study found that LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings command rent premiums of $11.33 per square foot over non-LEED buildings and have 4.1 percent higher occupancy rate.