Page 135 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

112 THE BUSINESS CASE FOR GREEN BUILDINGS

estate database, CoStar, which has information on more than two million properties,
since 2006 has listed whether a given office property has a LEED certification or
ENERGY STAR rating.
A study of 2000 large office buildings (defined as having at least 200,000 square
feet of leasable area) in the CoStar database by Professor Norman Miller of the
University of San Diego, released late in 2007, showed that over the period of 2004
through the first half of 2007, ENERGY STAR buildings (in the top 25 percent of
energy efficiency in the United States) had $2.00 per square foot higher rents and
2 percent higher occupancy. Each of these two factors increases building value meas-
urably. In fact, the ENERGY STAR-rated buildings that were sold in 2006 com-
manded a 30 percent premium (sales price per square foot) over those buildings that
weren’t so rated.* This is consistent with the larger CoStar study cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter.
There are developers using the precertification available from the LEED for Core
and Shell rating system to attract tenants and financing for high-rise office towers.
A large office tower in Chicago that opened in 2005 received a LEED-CS Gold rat-
ing along with the marketplace benefits of fast leasing and great tenants. Designed
by Goettsch Partners for the John Buck Company, the 51-story tower contains
1,456,000 square feet (134,000 square meter) of space, including a 370-car parking
garage. The building, 111 South Wacker, is anchored by the professional services
firm Deloitte, which leased 451,259 square feet (41,440 square meter), or more than
43 percent of the building.
The marketing benefits of LEED-CS pre-certification have encouraged nearly 1000
projects to register for this program by the spring of 2008; since these buildings aver-
age about $50 million in value (typically more than 350,000 square feet in area), this
is a strong statement from the development community about the expected value of
LEED certification.

Recruitment and Retention

One often overlooked aspect of green buildings is their effect on people’s willingness
to join or stay with an organization. It typically costs $50,000 to $150,000 to lose a
good employee, and most organizations experience 10 to 20 percent turnover per year,
some of it from people they really didn’t want to lose. In some cases, people leave
because of poor physical environments (as well as the Dilbert-parodied “boss from
hell”). In a workforce of 200 people, turnover at this level implies 20 to 40 people
leaving per year.
What if a green building could reduce turnover by 5 percent, for example, one to
two people out of the 20 to 40? Taken alone, that value would range from $50,000 to
possibly as much as $300,000, more than enough to justify the costs of certifying a

*See, for example, Daily Commercial News, http://dcnonl.com/article/id26427, accessed June 30, 2008.