Bring Your Tenants on Board

The following excerpt is from IREM’s publication, A Practical Guide to Green Real Estate Management (IREM © 2009):

The most successful way to green your properties is to get participation from the people who occupy them. Tenants’ daily activities use energy, water, and natural resources; produce waste; and impact indoor air quality—they frequently make decisions that relate directly to your sustainability goals. Increasingly, tenants are seeking out green buildings and expecting environmentally sensitive property management, so help them understand the role they play and become a positive influence on their decisions. 

Deliver the Right Message 

Throughout the following sections, alongside the green real estate strategies that you can directly implement, you’ll find specific suggestions for influencing occupant decisions and day to- day behavior that impact your efforts. To carry out these ideas, you’ll need to communicate effectively about the goals you are trying to achieve. Deliver the message in terms they’ll relate to—primarily, the money they can save and the environmental concerns they can mitigate. Energy and water efficiency in particular have immediate, quantifiable financial impacts for tenants, as almost all pay for their energy and water consumption directly or indirectly. 

One challenge you may face is that, for some components of green real estate management, tenants won’t see any direct cost savings. Here’s where the other, less tangible benefits can combine to create the incredibly powerful message that all organizations can do their part to slow global climate change. By occupying green buildings, your tenants create greater value for their organizations by: 

• Taking a huge step toward achieving their corporate social responsibility goals 
• Demonstrating financial responsibility, risk mitigation and community involvement 
• Staying one step ahead of potential carbon regulations 
• Providing a healthier, more productive work environment for their employees 
• Attracting new employees, particularly from a generation of recent graduates who now consider environmental and social responsibility when evaluating potential employers 

If your tenants need more convincing to get on board with your sustainability efforts, the environmental message should do the trick. Encourage tenants to take greater responsibility for the environment by showing them, in concrete terms, the impact they have. For example, knowing that office buildings generate approximately 380 pounds of waste per employee per year can be a great motivation to throw a piece of paper into the recycling bin instead of the trash. Tidbits like that are peppered throughout this publication, and we give you full permission to use them! 

To make the message more real, guide tenants to the following resources that can help them define their specific environmental footprint. The results can be incorporated into communications for your green real estate program. By knowing their impact, they may be inspired to act to lower it. 

• Tenants can explore the carbon footprint from their organizations’ energy use and business transportation using calculators from Carbon Neutral Company and Climate Trust.
• Employees can take this knowledge home and calculate their own footprint or their families’ using the EPA’s Personal Emissions Calculator.
• The Redefining Progress Ecological Footprint Quiz covers many angles of individuals’ environmental impact, from where you buy your food to how often you replace household items. 
• Help tenants see the quantifiable savings—financial and environmental—of purchasing energy-efficient office equipment. The ENERGY STAR Web site has savings calculators for each category of office equipment. 
• For multifamily properties, residents can explore the energy required to operate typical household appliances and electronics with the Wisconsin Public Service Electric Appliance Calculator. Households can also self-assess their water habits with a Family Water Audit tool from Water-Use It Wisely and quantify their water use with this water calculator. 
• To deliver the energy savings message in more meaningful terms, use the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator to convert kilowatt hours saved into equivalents such as cars taken off the road or acres of forest preserved.