Page 251 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

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SUSTAINABLE BROKERAGE:

DIFFUSING GREEN PRACTICES TO

GAIN BROAD MARKET ACCEPTANCE

RHETT MOUCHET AND CLARA FISHEL

SUMMARY

The issue of sustainable brokerage moves the whole discussion of a green
building bottom line beyond the confines of one company doing sustain-
able work to the general marketplace. Melaver | Mouchet, the brokerage
division of Melaver, Inc., devotes 95 percent of its activity to third-party
commercial representation, which means most of the work it does today
involves brokering deals that are not green. The market is still too young
to enable brokers to make a livelihood solely brokering green develop-
ments. As such, this chapter is as much aspirational—an indication of where
green brokerage is headed in the future—as it is a recounting of actual
case studies, which are still few in number.
However, Rhett Mouchet, Broker in Charge at Melaver | Mouchet, and
Clara Fishel, Sustainability Associate for this division, contend that bro-
kers can play a pivotal role in ramping up the diffusion of green practices.
Sustainable brokerage embodies the awareness that a broker’s work affects
the place where he or she lives and does business, and acknowledges that
brokerage can’t help but be IMBY (in my back yard). The close profes-
sional and personal relationships that are often forged between brokers

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