Three Sticky Notes on Commercial Real Estate & Sustainability

Three sticky notes to remember on the intersection of commercial real estate and sustainability People wildly underestimate how much they can actually improve their ROI on commercial real estate portfolios with just something like cost cutting. The work that we do in the community solar space for our clients is all about helping them access the program and in exchange for helping clean the energy grid, they essentially get a coupon on their electricity costs. So if we subscribe a million dollars worth of energy to community solar, we just created $100,000 of free flow for their commercial real estate. And with that they can take it and invest into even more sustainability strategies aimed at getting another 10% and another 10%, etc. The more sustainable you are, the more likely you remain in business long term. Implementing sustainability strategies is all about building a more resilient portfolio that can actually weather any storm. The next thing I want to talk about actually on that same vein, is leveraging synergy and performance partnerships to improve commercial real estate roi. Main point here is that commercial real estate tends to leverage OPM other people's money, but hardly ever OPW other people's work. You don't actually have to do this alone. You can find people who will do audits, find available savings, keep a portion of what they found, and then you get to keep the rest. This whole idea costs you nothing. You didn't have to give any of your time because a performance based consultant went to work for you and you still win. The same way commercial real estate leverages other people's money. You can find these types of people and leverage their work to create a net gain through synergy. I believe that synergy will be the future of business. It's this idea of not wasting energy in competition, but rather combining resources to get done. Working with a company or contractor in this way is supporting them a potential local business, and obviously buying back your time so that you can focus on whatever is most important for you and your real estate business. The last sticky point here is I want to talk about how forcing value add is a creative process. I'll tell you how we do it with solar leasing. We work with landowners and commercial real estate asset owners to lease their available space for a solar asset. But when you consider a roof of a commercial property, let's say it's usually only got some H Vac units up there, but you can get creative with enough space and lease your roof out to a solar developer to get a tenant the solar asset to protect your roof, which is one of the most important parts to a commercial real estate asset. Because obviously it protects everything underneath and inside. Real estate investing talks a lot about this idea of forced appreciation for things like capex projects that improve the property. But that's not the only way to do it. Being creative allows you to expand how you approach problems, and that's exactly what we do with solar leasing. In summary, implement sustainability strategies for find ways to leverage other people's work to do it without making investments, and approach sustainability and resiliency with creativity to come up with better quality ideas to improve your roi.