WASHINGTON (December 8, 2020) – The Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Greenprint Center for Building Performance has released its ULI Blueprint for Green Real Estate, a guide to improving sustainability across the industry. It is the organization’s first comprehensive resource to go in-depth on how real estate owners and developers can accelerate a sustainability program, and integrate it as part of their overall development strategy. The Blueprint includes strategic best practices collected from ULI Greenprint’s real estate members who, since 2009, have successfully reduced carbon across a global portfolio of over 10,000 buildings while generating significant financial value. ULI is a global, multidisciplinary real estate organization whose work is driven by more than 45,000 members dedicated to responsible land use and building thriving communities.

Real estate organizations recognize the strong business case for incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into their normal/day-to-day business operations. With new city policies that affect building energy performance, strong returns from cost savings on utilities savings, rising tenant demand, and pressure from investors, building owners are taking notice. ULI Blueprint for Green Real Estate focuses on real estate addressing environmental areas – energy, water, waste, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – but also recognizes that the role of a real estate sustainability program is much broader than it once was, now encompassing topics like resilience, health and wellness, and social equity.

The resource provides a roadmap outlining how to build a sustainability program:

• Building the foundation: The first step to creating a sustainability program is to develop the initial vision of what the program will do for the company, stakeholders and planet. This includes creating a dedicated sustainability job, setting goals and staying on top of trends;
• Integrating sustainability at the start: By implementing sustainable building practices at the beginning of the design phase, developers can optimize the efficiency of the final product;
• Quick wins in existing buildings: New developments need not be the only sustainability options. Implementing low-cost, high value sustainability opportunities, and tenant engagement programs, can create an ongoing commitment to sustainable behaviors;
• Financing and implementing capital projects: Investors and developers can build the financial case for sustainable investments by taking advantage of new technology and the best ways to finance big-ticket investments;
• Integrating sustainability across the value chain: The entire real estate value chain can integrate sustainability from supply chain to the investment committee;
• Tracking, reporting and communications: Tracking results, establishing sustainability reporting and communicating those results can maximize value for an organization, both internally and externally; and
• Continual evolution of sustainability programs: The sustainability lead’s role continues to change over time, expanding from basic energy, water, and waste considerations to climate adaptation and resilience, health and well-being, social and racial equity, and embodied carbon. Improving the environmental performance of a real estate portfolio can have significant co-benefits for each of these topics, which are likely to be integrated into future ESG goals.

“The ULI Blueprint for Green Real Estate distills the ‘secrets of success’ from dozens of sustainability directors at ULI Greenprint member companies, who over the past decade have generated billions in real estate value through baselining, benchmarking, and cost-effectively reducing their energy, water, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Billy Grayson, executive director for ULI’s Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance. “Our hope is that any real estate organization preparing to launch a sustainability initiative can hand this to the staff lead to help them hit the ground running and that even a seasoned real estate sustainability director will be able to brush up on the fundamentals as well as find some new ideas.”

Each chapter of the resource also includes case studies of industry leaders who have been at the forefront of embedding sustainability into their designs and operations, including:

• Brookfield Properties’ development group, a real estate operating company within Brookfield Asset Management, integrates ESG principles throughout all new mixed-use developments. To guide the design process, Brookfield created a set of design standards that assist all project teams in identifying best practices in sustainability, health and well-being, technology, design, and procurement. Although these standards represent a baseline for quality that all Brookfield assets are expected to attain, there is also room for innovation within individual projects and evolution as technologies and market expectations change;
• Clarion Partners, a U.S. real estate investment manager, focuses on both common areas and tenant spaces when making energy efficiency upgrades. Many properties in their residential portfolio have conducted lighting retrofits that updated outdoor and corridor lighting, with over 75 percent using exterior lighting fixtures controlled by daylighting photosensors; and
• SL Green, a fully integrated REIT, installed an ice plant at 11 Madison Avenue, a high-efficiency cooling system that stores ice, created during off-peak hours, when the electric grid produces the fewest emissions, to generate chilled water for air conditioning. Enough ice is created to run the plant for nine hours during peak cooling season, substantially reducing the property’s electricity consumption.

The ULI Blueprint for Green Real Estate can also be found on ULI’s Knowledge Finder platform.

About the ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance

The ULI Greenprint Center’s mission is to lead the global real estate industry towards improved environmental performance, focusing on energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions. ULI Greenprint is a member-driven organization that achieves its goals through measurement, action and education. Through measurement, benchmarking, knowledge sharing, and the implementation of best practices, ULI Greenprint and its members strive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and to achieve net zero carbon operations by 2050. ULI Greenprint is a research center within the ULI Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance, which also oversees ULI’s Urban Resilience Program and the Building Healthy Places initiative. For additional information, visit uli.org/greenprint.