Commercial Tenants Playbook
"In a tenant-driven market for office space like the City, tenants have the ability to demand high-performing buildings and spaces."
Prioritizing building performance can have positive long-term returns to your finances by significantly lowering your utility bills, making your space more comfortable and healthy and improving worker productivity.
Commercial Tenant's Role
In a tenant-driven market for office space like the City, tenants have the ability to demand high-performing buildings and spaces. As a tenant, this gives you a powerful opportunity to normalize an expectation around energy-efficient, healthy buildings, even if tenants are not always directly responsible for building operations. Prioritizing building performance can have positive long-term returns to your finances by significantly lowering your utility bills, making your space more comfortable and healthy and improving worker productivity.
Get an energy audit.
Hire an expert to conduct an energy audit, if one was not completed recently, to identify all possible areas for performance improvement. This will include analysis of energy demand, consumption, and use patterns, and should cover both base building and tenant equipment and systems.
Ensure the audit team focuses on both potential capital improvements as well as operational strategies. Depending on how in depth your audit is, this can also include information about cost and ROI to aid in decision making.
Develop a strategic energy management plan (SEMP).
A strategic energy management plan should focus on operational strategies for improving existing equipment efficiency, low-cost energy conservation measures that can be easily implemented without ownership approval, and capital planning for larger retrofits and systems replacements.
Take action when you pursue a new lease
1. Tell your broker your concerns about utility costs and building health. Ensure that your broker understands what your expectations are for the performance of the base building or how the building or landlord’s energy efficiency goals should align with yours.
2. Ask questions about the landlord’s sustainability goals. Review available documentation about the landlord’s sustainability goals or targets related to their own business or for the building.
3. Compare building scores for past levels of performance. The City discloses performance data for all municipal and non-municipal (institutional, commercial, and multifamily residential) buildings ≥50,000 sq. ft. that are required to comply with its benchmarking requirements. That information is publicly available.
The building’s ENERGY STAR score (on a scale from 1–100) indicates how it is performing. If a building has a high ENERGY STAR score, it means it has been historically well-managed with consistent operating expenses.
4. Understand how new building regulations might affect your site selection. The Building Energy Performance Standards (BEPS) are a regulatory tool that the City is using to help meet its green building and climate goals. A BEPS sets minimum building energy performance thresholds for existing buildings. These standards are based on and measured against a building’s demonstrated energy performance, as shown in their benchmarking data. A building owner with a property that doesn’t meet the standard for their property type will be required to improve the property’s performance.
While a tenant is not directly responsible for compliance with this regulation, how a building is performing, and improvements that might be required, could impact a tenant’s operational expenses.
5. Ask your broker how the regulations might affect your lease. There are a number of “green leasing” clauses that can ensure landlords and tenants both save on energy costs.
6. Ask if the potential space can be submetered. Having a submeter for your space allows you to separately track and measure your energy consumption. This can be useful to ensure you are meeting any energy targets and protect yourself from liability should the building not meet the BEPS thresholds.
Take action when renewing an existing lease
1. Find the building’s current performance score. Review publicly available information about the building’s performance.
2. Talk to your landlord about their plan for BEPS. Ask your landlord if the building is going to be compliant with the BEPS thresholds, and if not, what the plan is to bring the building into compliance. The answer might have implications for you as you renegotiate your lease.
3. Ask if your landlord can help improve the efficiency and comfort of your space. Energy reduction strategies can be simple, straightforward, and often implemented at little to no cost. Even if an improvement involves a capital cost investment, a landlord might be able to wrap it up into a larger building project, thereby creating economies of scale, or helping you access outside sources of funding. BEPS is designed to incentivize landlords to help improve the performance of their tenant’s spaces.
This resource is based upon content originally developed by the Institute for Market Transformation in collaboration with Cushman & Wakefield for the Building Innovation Hub, with funding and support provided by the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy & Environment.
