Page 254 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

232 CHAPTER 8

in-get-out-make-the-deal-move-on mentality. Laugh, but I view my profession as a
noble one. I have always tried my best to incorporate the highest ethical standards, envi-
ronmental stewardship, and community service into my business practices and profes-
sional service. I also take my faith in God very seriously and believe He tells us to be
good stewards of the land. I believe that God commands us to respect others and treat
everyone honestly and fairly. Personally, I have found the community service aspects of
my business to be as rewarding, if not more rewarding, than the money I’ve made.
In 2003, my friend Martin Melaver and I formed Mouchet & Associates as a sub-
sidiary of Melaver, Inc. The company name was changed to Melaver | Mouchet in
2005. We formed the brokerage division of Melaver, Inc. to handle third-party broker-
age opportunities and properties within the Melaver, Inc. real estate portfolio. Melaver,
Inc.’s tradition of community service fit with my ideas about how real estate in gen-
eral, and brokerage in particular, ought to be done. Two aspects of Melaver, Inc.’s
triple bottom line—the financial and the social—fit well with my own sense of how
brokerage should operate. The rub, however, was that third aspect, the environmental
one.
For a number of years, our brokerage group was the laggard division in the com-
pany, resisting learning about LEED and green practices even as the rest of the com-
pany was taking leadership roles in this regard. We just couldn’t get our hands around
marketing a product that hardly existed in our area. We could see, if not feel viscer-
ally, the connection between giving back to the community and being better stewards
of the environment. But it was more an academic, intellectual connection than some-
thing we could connect with personally and emotionally. And how about the connec-
tion between the environmental bottom line and the financial one? How were brokers
going to make money promoting sustainable development? The vast majority of our
business was not, and still is not, brokering sustainable projects. My colleagues and
I would starve if it were. Nevertheless, over the years, my brokerage colleagues and I
have come to recognize a few key things:

■ The need to re-frame the notion of brokerage. The currency of value held by bro-
kers is information and our wealth of business and social relationships. The infor-
mation we share with our social network of clients and how we educate them will
shape the way development occurs in our region.
■ Entitlement. We need to recognize that, in many ways, we are responsible for
shaping the way our community will look (or not look) in the coming years, sim-
ply by the deals we facilitate.
■ Empowerment. Despite having no apparent authority or power—we are, after all,
simply intermediaries between buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants—we do
have a significant amount of leverage in shaping where and in what ways develop-
ment occurs in our own backyard.
■ The capacity to be change agents. Our reach into development activity is far
broader and deeper than that of our colleagues who do development work for
Melaver, Inc. For every single green project they do, we literally touch one hundred