Page 257 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building
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SUSTAINABLE BROKERAGE 235
Sustainable brokerage also embraces a much wider concept of service, serving the
aims and goals of the client in the wider context of the community.
Our communities are growing. How and where our clients decide to develop their
land, construct their buildings, and build out the spaces they lease will have broad and
lasting impacts. So we understand that the work we do as real estate professionals has
consequences for the neighborhoods where we live and raise our families and for the
communities where we—and our clients—do business. And as people involved in the com-
munities where we live and play and work, and as professionals whose livelihood de-
pends on community viability and repeat business, we’re both entitled and obligated to
do more—much more—than simply facilitate deals.
First and foremost, sustainable brokerage fosters a personal vision of community. It
is about becoming educated and educating others as to the bits and bytes of knowledge
we need to acquire to implement this vision. It is about facilitating connections among
those players in the community—developers, owners, designers, government workers,
academicians, folks from the non-profit world—who are most empathetic to further-
ing our vision of community. And it is about orchestrating the various parts so that
vision becomes a reality.
The Process of Sustainable
Brokerage
The business case for sustainable brokerage, like most anything related to sustainabil-
ity generally, is a process. It is bottom-up driven, starting from within a brokerage
organization and radiating outward into the larger real estate community and beyond.
It is integrative and collaborative, involving brokers’ close working relationships with
developers, the financial community, and key end-users. It is educational and iterative,
with each step in the process repeating and learning from and refining prior, more
naïve earlier steps. And it is non-linear, characterized by two steps forward and one
step back, since sustainable brokerage is still in its infancy and advancing a new par-
adigm while still, for the moment, engaging in the old paradigm. The business case for
sustainable brokerage involves these steps:
1 Re-framing the notion of brokerage.
2 Taking ownership of and responsibility for the development deals brokered in one’s
community.
3 Becoming educated internally about sustainable practices.
4 Designating an internal champion to serve as the point person for galvanizing a sus-
tainable ethos, disseminating information internally, and assisting with sustainable
business development.
5 Developing a toolbox of information with materials, technologies, and case studies
that will assist brokers with their day-to-day work.