Ben Myers, vice president, sustainability, Boston Properties; Anne Peck, vice president, head of ESG+R, TA Realty: Marta Schantz, senior vice president, ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance; and Karen Mahrous, head of ESG at Clarion Partners, Clarion Partners, discuss best practices for tenant engagement and examples of how property owners are aligning their sustainability goals.
A late August webinar hosted by the ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance featured sustainability professionals from Greenprint real estate member companies to discuss creative strategies for aligning net zero goals with tenant engagement.
The “Working Toward Net Zero: Best Practices and Examples to Engage Tenants in Sustainability” webinar explored how property managers must engage their tenants to achieve carbon reduction and other building-wide goals driven by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
Tenant energy usage in a commercial building often comprises over half of the total consumption. The ULI Greenprint Center hosted the webinar in anticipation of a collection of primers to be made available on Knowledge Finder in Fall 2022. The first two primers: “Taking Green Leases to Net Zero” and “Engaging Tenants through Data Collection,” will share best practices and examples to incorporate net zero goals into tenant engagement strategies.
Karen Mahrous, head of ESG, Clarion Partners, said, “We undergo a tremendous effort to analyze the data that our team has in a scalable way because we still have about 1,400 assets and try to give back, give that feedback back to our asset managers and our property managers to help incorporate energy efficiency measures or other measures into their budgets.”
“You know something as time, that we think of as simple, as data sharing isn’t that simple in some industries. Some of our [for example] warehouse tenants? They have a lot of privacy and confidentiality concerns around their data,” added Anne Peck, vice president and head of environmental, social, governance and resiliency at TA Realty.
“I was at Boston Properties for two years in construction management working closely with property management executing projects. So really learning the attitudes and perspectives and sometimes the baggage that property management brings to these discussions is super helpful for me and in communicating back to them why we’re doing some of the things we’re doing,” shared Ben Meyers, vice president of sustainability at Boston Properties.
“We set our goals, our science-based emission reduction target, our carbon-neutral operations target, and the two carbon reduction targets we’ve already hit, including energy and waste goals. All of those were formulated and created with property management at the table,” said Meyers, “They’ve very much set the goals, and the intentionality behind those goals comes from our property management engineering teams.”
“We are continuing to collect data on tenant emissions and work with our tenants to help them meet their goals and meet, you know, what we think will be eventually asked of us as well,” said Mahrous. “Engagement activities vary, and we’ll spend a lot of time talking about that today, but you know we do issue green lease language. We have been recognized as a green lease leader. We partner on ESG initiatives with our tenants.”
“I started here just under a year ago, and one of the first things we tried to do is implement green lease language into our standard use contract,” shared Peck, “It’s very important and explaining how easy it is and how effortless it really is on [the tenant’s] part was a huge part of it.”
Learn about how our Greenprint member companies are implementing tenant engagement strategies to further integrate sustainability goals in the “Working Toward Net Zero: Best Practices and Examples to Engage Tenants in Sustainability” webinar on Knowledge Finder today.
Be on the lookout for the publication of Working Toward Net Zero: Tenant Engagement Best Practices and Examples, a growing collection of primers to drive sustainability through tenant engagement on Knowledge Finder later this year.
