Page 262 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

240 CHAPTER 8

Most brokers probably don’t view themselves as entitled (or empowered) to seek
out particular clients and exclude others. But developers certainly feel free to select
the locale and locations where they wish to build. And financial institutions decide
whether to invest or not invest in various projects. Tenants make decisions every day
about where (and where not) to locate. It seems odd even to pose the question, why
shouldn’t brokers feel a similar sense of entitlement? They don’t have to be simple
order-takers. In fact, they should not be.

BECOMING EDUCATED ABOUT
SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES
Everyone in our brokerage division has taken a LEED preparatory workshop and has
taken the LEED exam at least once. Half of our group is LEED accredited, which is sub-
par for the Melaver organization as a whole, but still not bad when compared to other
brokerage companies. But getting conversant with the LEED program is simply a base-
line, a starting point. Education, at least for us, consists of three interrelated compo-
nents: research, internal information sharing, and inter-departmental communication.
Quality information is as critical (perhaps more critical) in the commercial real estate
industry as it is in any industry. Like traditional brokers, we are dedicated to staying
informed of events and trends in our marketplace. We track demographic information,
transactions, and economic growth rates; we locate comps and conduct market surveys
just like everyone else. The sustainable brokerage difference is that we infuse all of
this traditional information with the latest sustainable development news, trends, tech-
nologies, products, and processes. We conduct research on everything from financing
tactics to who, what, where, and how different companies are developing high-per-
formance green buildings. We’ve found cost-benefit analyses and type-specific studies
(office, industrial, retail) to be particularly informative. Case studies, articles from print
and online trade publications, and whatever sustainable development databases we can
get our hands on are organized and compiled in a central, accessible location.
Sharing and discussing this information throughout the brokerage group is neces-
sary for us to really learn from the flood of information, to let it sink in, to make sense.
As a group, we share sustainable development news and information at our weekly
staff meetings and monthly “Lunch & Learns” as well as through e-mails and infor-
mal discussions. The internal information sharing of sustainable brokerage is anti-
thetical to the protective and competitive nature of traditional brokerage. Traditional
brokers often treat information as proprietary, as a secret advantage they must guard
closely and keep to themselves. As sustainable brokers, we figure that the more we
talk to each other and share information, the more we all learn. And we believe that
learning and a lack of internal competitiveness actually bolster our competitive advan-
tage in the marketplace.
Our learning and our competitive advantage also are enhanced when we communi-
cate and go on client calls with members of the other departments in the Melaver, Inc.
organization. On any given call, one of our brokers might be providing office market