• Mary's LinkedIn
• GreenT Climate Software's Website
• GreenT Climate Software's LinkedIn

Note: This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors.

Mary Nitschke: Nobody comes into the space going, if I could just fail one more time. We want to be successful. And especially a lot of the projects that we’re considering with respect to making our assets more efficient, they’re not cheap. Understanding where everything is and how you can finance that takes away a little of the paralysis of do we do it? Do we not do it? How do we do it? And I think that’s really exciting.

Sean Swentek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Future of Commercial Real Estate Sustainability. Today, I’m speaking with Mary Nitschke, Chief Sustainability Officer at GreenT Climate Software. Mary, thank you so much for joining me today.

Mary Nitschke: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

Sean Swentek: I’m excited to have you. I know this is going to be a great conversation. We were just chatting before this. The work you’re doing in the market is really exciting, and I’m excited to hear your take on it. You’ve helped a number of organizations transform their sustainability programs in your career. Can you share a story on one of the most impactful changes you’ve seen that drove both environmental and financial results?

Mary Nitschke: I think my biggest win had to do with a multifamily property in California that had a compactor and no recycling. We looked at this thing, and the facilities person had to manually run it because it was the old type. I found a scrapper who would take that compactor away and give me $250 for the material. Because we took the compactor out, there’s always that mechanical component. Once we got rid of that, we suddenly had room for a trash bin and a recycling bin, which suddenly overnight, we had 50% diversion at the property.

The residents went wild because they’d been wanting recycling. Trash costs were reduced by 60%, which made my asset manager very happy. And the city was so excited about the revolutionary way that we approached recycling and diversion that they gave us a trophy. I think that was the biggest, funnest win. But I’ve seen a lot of changes within the industry, and there have been a lot of big wins, but I think that’s the one that’s the most fun for me because it was that people, planet, profit, and a trophy.

Sean Swentek: You can tell this is a sustainability podcast because we’re excited about this topic of trash.

Mary Nitschke: I’m very trashy. It’s going to come up again. It’ll get real.

Sean Swentek: In your work at GreenT, multifamily is a big focus of yours. What are the issues unique to multifamily versus other commercial real estate when it comes to sustainable investing and pursuing net zero?

Mary Nitschke: Thank you for talking about multifamily because I’ve, for my entire career, and I’ve been in this space for almost 25 years now, have been wildly unpopular for most of that tenure. The challenges around multifamily, which is sort of the has been treated like the redheaded stepchild of commercial real estate and residential family in terms of all things commodity and utility. It doesn’t behave like either space.

Some of the challenges that we see in multifamily that are exclusive to that space is you can have a building that has 250 units in it, which means that you have 251 energy meters instead of one. Additionally, instead of one tenant that you have to get a green lease for, you have 250, and the lease terms can be different. So these are all these different variables coming in that make capturing the data to understand what’s happening and motivating behavior changes. It makes it ridiculously complex.

For most of the market, we can’t even see 70% of the consumption within the building because of these challenges in construction and the aggregation and obtaining that data. So I think those are some of the big challenges around that data capture. And I’m a big fan of superheroes, monster movies, and Hellboy has the best line ever, which is in the absence of light, darkness prevails. And multifamily has been in darkness in terms of how our communities consume utilities, so we don’t know how to manage that sustainability.

Sean Swentek: It makes a lot of sense. How is technology helping to address some of those issues?

Mary Nitschke: There’s a couple of things. Technology, there’s a lot of technology out there right now that’s pulling in that consumptive data at the building level. Some of it is still priced a little bit high for most of the operators to utilize on an entire portfolio basis. So that’s one component. The other, there’s other technologies out there that is aggregating the consumptive data to pull it in. And I’m now starting to see some AI, which is super cool, that will model what that whole building data potentially looks like. So even though it’s an assumption, that technology at least gets you closer to the idea of how your building is performing.

And I think it’s not so much a technology component, but it’s a regulation component, which terrifies a lot of people. But I’m a little bit excited about it because when the regulation has come in and said you have to do a compliance benchmark, what that means is that the regulatory agency compels the utility provider to give us that whole building data so that we can be sustainable. And I think that’s pretty wonderful. It’s this nice side effect because now we can actually see what’s happening in the buildings, and we can, we understand what levers we should pull to cultivate change.

Sean Swentek: You mentioned an example of a property with 250 meters on it. Sounds like utility management is a pretty important topic in multifamily, commercial as a whole. How are strategies around utility management evolving to support sustainability goals?

Mary Nitschke: Honestly, I wouldn’t say evolving. I would say developing. There is a trend that is happening in multifamily right now, and there are debates happening if utility consumption is controllable or uncontrollable. When you look at the financial statements for a property, if you look at the P&L, typically utilities are put below the line in noncontrollable. If you think about that in terms of how you behave in your home, do you leave the lights on all the time? No. Of course, you don’t because that would cost you way more than you were willing to spend. And so you control it within the home, but we treat it within the multifamily building as if it’s noncontrollable.

And I think the trend that’s just emerging right now is that people are starting to get these measurements because of regulation, and they’re starting to see economic drivers when you control this expense category. And I think that is the trend we’re going to be seeing is that this is a controllable expense category, and you can manage it. And I think that’s really exciting.

Sean Swentek: If I’m a commercial real estate owner operator, multifamily or otherwise, how would you summarize the current playing field of standards, regulations, incentives that are going on in the market?

Mary Nitschke: It’s dizzying. It’s currently being measured manually in multifamily. This is one of the great things that I was excited to come to GreenT because it’s pulling all of that information together into one place, into one house. So you can evaluate your performance against regulation and what that fine would look like compared to, and see what that ROI is, and then pulling in the investment or incentives that are available to you so you can actually change what your prioritization is based on those factors.

I think that’s really revolutionary, which excites me because I want to be part of the next big movement in sustainability and multifamily. And I think pulling all of that information together into one spot to give somebody the story of this is where you can succeed, I think that’s awesome because we all want, nobody comes into this space going, if I could just fail one more time. We don’t want to do that. We want to be successful. And especially a lot of the projects that we’re considering with respect to making our assets more efficient, they’re not cheap.

Understanding where everything is and how you can finance that takes away a little of the paralysis of do we do it? Do we not do it? How do we do it? And I think that’s really exciting.

Sean Swentek: You mentioned the word fines very casually, and we have listeners who are not commercial real estate owner operators. Can you just talk a little bit about building performance standards?

Mary Nitschke: We should totally had this conversation before Halloween because it’s super scary. Let’s say you have a property in Seattle, Washington. It was super fun. The penalties, so both the city of Seattle and the state have their own BPS requirements. So you think of it like Oprah. You get a car and you get a car, but instead of that, it’s like, you comply here and you comply there. And these two are different. If you can’t comply, the fines for Seattle are $3.50 per square foot. So you’re talking millions.

Sean Swentek: Wow.

Mary Nitschke: The state is a little bit better. It’s only $3.50 per square foot. But if you’re not complying on both, the fines can pretty much be game over for your asset. So BPS is very real. And when these fines are going to start hitting, which in some markets, like if you look at New York and DC, they’re going to be hitting in the next, Boston, few years. When those fines are part of the financial statement, that’s going to be a turn for a lot of people because they may not necessarily be paying attention to this regulation, but it’s happened. This has already passed, and this is local jurisdiction.

So this isn’t something I know a lot of people will like, Congress will save us. It’s if the thing is state congress or in some cases, it’s at the city level, maybe not. This is a local jurisdiction. So there’s not anything that’s going to be that federally will change what’s happening here. So you have to be aware of all of these different regulations and compliances out there. And some of them are sort of crazy. And I say crazy because it can be onerous quickly.

City of Los Angeles doesn’t have one of these building performance standards, but their program of compliance benchmarking also involves an audit of the property every five years if your building is inefficient. If you don’t do the audit, the fine is $202 per day.

Sean Swentek: That adds up quick.

Mary Nitschke: It adds up quick, and a lot of people don’t even know. So it’s challenging, and that’s really the frame of reference. There’s a new F-word. It does have four letters, and a lot of people will feel the other F-word regarding it. And these fines can be significant. So a lot of people are very concerned about how their property is going to perform against the standard. And even if they perform well today on some of these standards, it changes in five years. There’s another goalpost you have to hit. So you have to be aware of what’s happening now and plan into the future because that capital investment, you don’t want to make the same investment right now that you’re going to make five years from now.

Sean Swentek: How have you seen the net zero movement transform commercial real estate since your 2016 predictions?

Mary Nitschke: So in 2016, it’s funny you bring this up. In 2016, at a big conference at NMHC, I presented on coming soon to a code near you, net zero. And I was pretty much chased out of that room like Frankenstein’s monster. It was like pitchforks and torches, and I made no friends. And I did have one person very kindly tell me that I was full of it. I didn’t see the pandemic coming because I said, this is going to really become a trend in 2020. The pandemic really kind of kicked the can down the road, and now we’re seeing it. We’re seeing it in green building code in California, and it’s heavily integrated into these BPS standards and goals to become net zero.

What we are seeing because of it, so before it was no, it’s not going to happen. Now it’s, oh, it is going to happen. I think the next understanding that people are going to take on, which I’m very excited about, is our components within the unit. We don’t need gas to be good. So it’s always been something that I’ve championed against is getting rid of the gas ranges in multifamily because, frankly, if they’re not balanced correctly and if they’re not clean enough, they can emit a substantial amount of carbon monoxide, and the residents don’t know.

And it’s not enough to set off the sensors that exist within the units because those sensors are set to a threshold of you’re going to die in 20 minutes unless you get out when you hear this siren. The math is pretty simple. For every minute that you spend in a room with that gas emitting from the stove at that low level is a minute coming off of the end of your life. So getting rid of these is going to be awesome. And I’ve seen some changes with Lawrence Livermore Lab has touted this as the Department of Energy.

And what they’ve shown is that there’s a convection range that you can get that is a direct plug into a 120-volt outlet. So you don’t even need to do a huge, to take out the old one and put the new one in. And these units actually have a little battery in them. So even if your building loses power, your residents are still going to be able to cook for a couple of days, and that also changes the load on the panel. So I think technology is a huge part of going net zero, and I think we’re going to start looking at it differently because we have to.

But I think the benefit of this is we’re going to see similar to what we saw in standard commercial real estate when we integrated LEED into our building design is we saw these higher rents for these highly efficient buildings. We’re going to see that in multifamily, and I’m very excited about that. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, Cushman Wakefield produced a study in 2023 where they compared their building stock of Class A conventional certified LEED versus non-certified. And they discovered that the buildings that were certified saw 3.1% higher rents. So we’re going to start seeing economic benefit from this net zero journey.

Sean Swentek: Wow. Can you talk about the importance of driving alignment across teams in order to ensure success in sustainability programs?

Mary Nitschke: I’ll give you a cautionary tale. You have to have information that cascades down to all levels of your property team, or it will fail. One is old habits die hard. So in terms of purchasing, unless there’s something to explain the why of the influence, they’re going to go back to their own way because unless they understand what you’re trying to do, they think what they’re doing is better. And it’s just because they don’t know. It’s not that they’re malicious.

The other thing that’s really important about cascading something that you have implemented down is training. I saw this happen at a brand new lease-up property that had a 90% efficient domestic hot water system, a big hot water system that operated for the whole building for all of the tenants. They never explained to the facilities team at that site what the maintenance plan was for that system compared to an older, less efficient version, and it’s very different. So it wasn’t properly maintained to what it needed. It was being maintained based on what they knew, and that meant that it failed within five years. And it was an $80,000 piece of equipment that then needed to be replaced. That hurts.

So I think in order to make something really achieve the goals in terms of the efficiency and that whole lifecycle that that piece of equipment needs to operate as, it’s really important to cascade the information down through all levels of the organizations. The regionals need to understand it. The site teams need to understand it, and there needs to be evergreen education materials on how to maintain those programs, or they can’t.

Sean Swentek: How can property managers use data and analytics to optimize both utility costs and their environmental impact?

Mary Nitschke: That’s the best way to do it. You use data, and that’s why everybody is trying to capture the data is because you can’t, you don’t understand how to take action unless you’re looking at the full picture. What they can do is at a basic level, when you’re doing a benchmark, I did a presentation on this in 2019. Energy benchmarking is asking, answering the esoteric question of does this consumption make my butt look big? You have to look at the consumption to a comparative.

So you really need to understand and use analytics to see how this asset is comparing to another. And you need to take into some factors, of course. If you’ve got a garden-style building and you’re looking at water, don’t compare it to a podium style that has no plant material whatsoever because it’s going to look weird. But when you do a like-for-like and you can do it on cost per unit, you can do it cost per square foot, take a look at some various factors. Look at where your rate is on that basis. Look at what your consumption is and see what’s driving the challenge, and then you can solution for it from there.

I had a property that was a huge garden-style community, and we looked at the water expense. We were able to do a comparative of the in-unit versus the outdoor because they were separately metered. And the property was performing in terms of resident consumption. It was doing just fine. But it was the outlier, the driver in the cost had to do with that irrigation. And so by using analytics, we were able to pretty quickly figure out, like, oh, this is what I need to focus on in order to achieve my goal.

Sean Swentek: Which sustainability regulations and building performance standards are having the biggest impact on commercial properties today?

Mary Nitschke: Right now, there are 13 building performance standards that have been approved and announced. And which ones are going to have the biggest impact is still sort of TBD. Right now, what everybody is concerned about is New York, Denver, DC, and Colorado because those are the ones coming up the quickest. So if you’re looking at the buffet of BPS, it’s the one that’s right in front of you that’s barreling down at you that you may not have time to fix your estate before you get fined. That’s what’s going to take the biggest precedent for people right now.

But I also like the opportunity with these BPSs. I like to slide down the bit further a little bit. It’s like, okay, this is what you have to work on right now. But then let’s look at a prioritization list on what is emerging, what’s coming up in the next target so that you can, what you work on right now might be affected by that. Additionally, one of my favorite F-words is free. There’s a lot of free money out there related to these BPS ordinances that are coming. So if you’re looking at how your building is performing and it’s kind of low, take that opportunity right now to go after those incentive dollars to get your property improved before the fines start coming.

Sean Swentek: How does one go about building internal buy-in for sustainability initiatives?

Mary Nitschke: When I started in efficiency, we didn’t even say sustainability because that wasn’t a term. ESG, net zero had never come on the planet in 2001. It was efficiency. I went into our SVP of operations office. I’m like, I’d like to talk to you about saving water. And the gentleman looked at his wrist and went, oh my God. I’m late for a meeting. And we watched him scurry around the wall and out of his door, and I realized I just chased an SVP out of his office. And I think it was because I wasn’t using the right language.

We have to talk when we’re talking in sustainability, we have to really be prepared to have the conversation around terms that our listeners understand. So with that SVP and with asset management, I very quickly converted to talking in dollars because that was their love language. I did have one asset manager that I had to convert everything into, and I wish this was a joke and it wasn’t, large round table pizzas that were cheese only. If I could take the savings and say, this is how many pizzas you would get, I could get approved. So it’s very important to understand what matters to the individual you’re talking to when you’re trying to achieve sustainable results and make sure you speak in their love language, not yours.

Sean Swentek: What are you seeing in the market right now around general sentiment for renewable energy, specifically solar, battery storage, EV charging? What does the marketplace look like in your perception today for them?

Mary Nitschke: It’s emerging. All of those technologies in multifamily, we have some challenges. First, on-site solar becomes a little bit challenging because the payback can have a very long tail. Additionally, we may not even have the roof space to put enough solar on the roof to achieve any goals. We’re just tears in the wind. So I see opportunities coming with these community solar programs where you can purchase renewable, get that to your building at a rate that’s typically at or less than what the utility provider is charging. I see that as coming in as a huge benefit in this industry.

But I do love the ideas of the battery and where I think the battery is going to become a big solution within multifamily. In addition, if you’re in markets that have rolling blackouts and you haven’t done solar with battery storage, you might want to take a look at that just for the resiliency of your asset. But where I see batteries is also a huge factor is EV charging. I think what’s going to get solution just right now in multifamily for existing real estate, we have panel limitations. The current electrical setup within the building won’t allow us to add the number of level two chargers that we need.

Because when you think of level two charging, it’s 240 volts. Think of it like adding an AC unit to a 2,000-square-foot house in Fresno, California. So you need to be able to manage that load. I think battery storage can help get us there because what if we can before the panel, we can do a storage so that we’re not pulling in that same load off of that panel. I think it’s going to mitigate some of the cost and improve the ROI on those charging stations.

Sean Swentek: That’s really a great idea. When it comes to measurement, what metrics should property managers track to demonstrate clear ROI around their sustainability initiatives?

Mary Nitschke: I personally am a big fan of cost, both in terms of the cost of the measure and also in terms of savings. And I think the big trap, the thing you have to be careful of when you’re looking at cost is, and this is just a little nerdy math thing, but you are talking to me, so I think you were prepared for it to get a little nerdy today. Look at your prior consumption and use the same rate that you’re using when you’re looking at the today consumption.

Because I think a trap that a lot of people get into where it gets weird is they look at the old rate and go, oh, my cost was this, and now my cost is this, so the savings isn’t that good. It actually could be better. You have to look at it as, you have to make the apples the same apple, or if you’ve got a Fuji and a Granny Smith, you’re like, why is this one so much sweeter? This one is so sour. So you have to make your apples the same and look at it that way, but then convert it to cost because, again, that’s the language that we know we’re comfortable in. And I think that’s the one that speaks within the industry the best, frankly.

It speaks to the investors. The investor class, yes, they’ll have sustainability goals, but at the end of the day, they want the portfolio. They want their fund to perform, and they have linked this performance to sustainability. So talking in cost is great. They’re still not going to be, oh, you know what? That million dollar savings, that’s okay, but I was looking for carbon. They’re going to say, this is good. Can we get this too? So it’s a good starting place as well as executive teams, asset managers, they understand that dollar metric and so do your site teams. Even down to your facilities team, that’s the metric that is meaningful for them. We have to make sure we’re using their language.

Sean Swentek: How are utility benchmarking requirements changing property management practices?

Mary Nitschke: Again, it comes down in the absence of light, darkness prevails. Do you know, super fun fact that even the act of putting your portfolio into Portfolio Manager, Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and benchmarking and measuring that utility consumption changes it by 2.4%. Just the act. It reduces it just by looking at it. So that’s pretty spectacular. And then it also gives us a starting point where we can do, because I have yet to meet anybody in commercial real estate that goes, yeah, I really don’t like to compete. We do. We want to compare.

And so it gives us one more comparative. And if we have a consistent comparative, it’s great because then we can take action. And I think that’s how changing utility evaluation and the standardization of that is so key. In the BPS, they all have different end targets, but just the act of measuring it gives us an ability to look at our portfolio that we’ve never had before. And I think that’s really exciting and changes things, and also changes where we want to focus our CapEx.

Sean Swentek: What emerging technologies are making the biggest difference in both utility management and sustainable investment optimization?

Mary Nitschke: I think that there are two. One is AI, because I think that is filling the gaps in our modeling so that we can, at the very least, we can make a partially informed decision, if not a fully informed decision. It gives us that ability to take action and instead of sitting in paralysis, which is where we’ve been for a very long time. So I think AI is a great contributor in terms of moving things forward. I do think we need to be careful of it because it is garbage in, garbage out. So whatever information we’re feeding that AI is going to get, it could come back and bite us. So you have to make sure that you vet that solution before you deploy it.

The other thing that I think is really exciting is sensors. We’re back to trash. I know that’s not what you thought the sensor was, it is. Because I’m seeing more and more adoption of technology around waste management solutions. We historically, when we’re at these programs, we trust the hauler, which I think is crazy because the waste management industry in the United States was started by the mob after prohibition. And we’re trusting them to tell us what our services should look like. And there’s good haulers and bad haulers out there, so they’re not, but it is a little bit sketchy. It’s better to have light.

And that’s what these sensors do is it really creates the opportunity to right-size the program. And frankly, it gives us visibility into the seasonality of trash in our communities. I personally have seen there’s a bigger influence of trash when we get into the holiday season for the longest reasons. And then it kind of dips down, and then when we get into our big leasing season, we have a lot of move-ins, move-outs. We have to change our service levels, but nobody does that because we don’t have that visibility. So we set it to whatever the threshold is of code red, and we leave it there into perpetuity. With these technologies, I see a huge opportunity for us to really manage those cost drivers and really improve our diversion, which when we’re talking about net zero, we also should be thinking about the zero waste. How much can we send other places than the landfill?

Sean Swentek: You said we were trashy and you were. We ended up there again. I love it. Mary, what emerging trends are you seeing in commercial real estate climate action plans?

Mary Nitschke: I’m seeing a couple of things. I’m seeing climate action plans occur at the property management level. And this is kind of cascading. This has a couple of different levers pressing us towards that. One is our investors. They want to, they want to see that we should be friends, that we have prioritizations consistent with theirs. So we’re actually creating these plans because of investment strategy. I think we’re also starting to see a little bit of a trend towards it for our marketing and brand perspective.

And now we’re back to BPS because it’s all about the callback for me. I think it’s funny. But with some of these building performance standards requirements, they will publicly post your performance. And local law 97 in New York is a big part of it. They actually smack it on your building with a grade like a B, C, D, F. It’s like a health code violation, and that impacts our brand.

So I think we’re seeing it twofold. This is one, and it’s all driven by money, so let’s keep it tied to the economics. One is we’ve worked really hard to make these beautiful assets. We don’t want the blemish on it, so we’re going to create a policy to solve for that. We also want to attract capital, so we want to show our friends that we have the same priorities. So I see that those are the drivers of even the creation of these policies.

Sean Swentek: Speaking of financial impact, how can one balance operational efficiency with sustainability goals?

Mary Nitschke: I think that efficiency and sustainability go together. If you think of even the word sustainability, it comes from R&D. It is this process sustainable? Can I do the same amount or more with less? And so it’s not about it being a cost additive as much as it is about being a cost avoidance. Now what we do need to do and understand is we need to look at the whole lifecycle of the thing.

So I’ll pick on LEDs when they first came out, and everyone was having heart failure because they’re like, oh my God. This is so expensive. I can get this other bulb for a dollar, and this one’s four. It’s terrible. But then you look at how many of the other kind of bulb you had to buy to compare to the one, and suddenly, I mean, you have to look at it both ways when you’re looking at the balance is take into consideration not just the cost avoidance today, but that long-term cost avoidance. And I think that’s the way to do it when you’re looking at that balancing of your purchasing, your efficiency, and sustainability.

Sean Swentek: What do you believe is the most overlooked opportunity today in building performance optimization?

Mary Nitschke: In terms of building performance, I think the biggest thing that we are overlooking is the people who are in our buildings. We think, oh, they don’t care. But every survey that everybody has done shows that they do care. Bloomberg talks about renter preferences in millennials and in boomers. I think they just forgot Gen X, and how the majority of them as renters prefer sustainable product.

We also have learned and seen that tenants in commercial buildings, they’ll migrate to and pay more for the efficient building because they understand that that affects their operating costs, and so that higher rent is offset by those utilities. But yet we ignore both of these groups when it comes to behavior. And so we’re back to creating transparency, visibility, engagement, and community with the people within our buildings and making sure that they understand how things work.

I had a resident who, at a unit inspection, told me, shared with me that her toilet was haunted. I asked her to explain this. She says periodically, it just flushes because she didn’t understand that that cultivated a leak. So there’s a tremendous amount of education that needs to be done there. Additionally, there’s education that needs to be happened with the teams within our communities. I’ve gone into corridors and hallways where a window has been left open by the cleaning crew to vent out the smell of the cleaning material, but nobody ever circled back and shut the window. That’s a leak.

So we have all of these low-hanging fruit behavioral opportunities, and I think that’s the biggest miss because these are all people who care. They just don’t know.

Sean Swentek: Post-election, are you anticipating any significant changes in regulations, standards, incentives, otherwise?

Mary Nitschke: No. I’m not. People are probably like, what? Does she eat paint chips as a child? What’s wrong with her? But if we look back historically, the last time we had a conservative president, that’s when BPS emerged. All of the building performance standards that we’re seeing are happening at the local jurisdiction, at the state or lower. And so federal is not going to get involved. I don’t see that this is going to go away. And based on, I mean, last election cycle, conservative house pulled us out of the Paris Agreement. And so that’s when all the cities formed a coalition and said, we need to get to net zero.

So I don’t think what’s affecting us today is going to go away. I think it’s going to continue to cascade forward. I think consumer demand is going to continue to move this forward. And so I don’t see the outcome of the elections affecting commercial real estate in this huge magnitude. Additionally, let’s talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. There are so many states, and it doesn’t matter what color the state is, there are so many states who have applied for and obtained their funds that that program is in a position it cannot be dismantled for five years.

Sean Swentek: Wow.

Mary Nitschke: So it’s not going away. So the incentives aren’t going to change, and the regulation isn’t going to be affected by what happens in Washington.

Sean Swentek: Based on your experience with both public and private sector sustainability initiatives, what’s the one change that would most accelerate CRE’s path to net zero in your opinion?

Mary Nitschke: There’s so many little things. It’s like Benjamin Franklin has this quote, with little strokes fell great oaks, and that’s sort of how the path to net zero is formed. I don’t think there’s a big cataclysmic thing that’s going to happen to get to net zero unless the entire grid shuts down in some post-apocalyptic event. So I think it is a steady progression that we’re on, and I don’t think it stops moving to get to net zero.

I think some of the big game changers are going to be the resident, that tenant engagement component. And I misspeak when I say resident because I think it also occurs in commercial. We have commercial buildings today that have a single tenant, and this is an opportunity for green lease and communication and understanding of consumptive behavior. And I think that we need to just embrace that it is time to engage with our tenants in multifamily as well so that they understand how they affect things because they care. All the data points to them caring.

So I think that’s the biggest movement is that communication and that sense of community within the property. And I’ll also include and throw into that soup, I’ll throw in the site teams as well. They need to understand.

Sean Swentek: You throw on your prognosticator cap for a moment. What is one prediction you have for the future of commercial real estate sustainability?

Mary Nitschke: It’s going to grow. I think we’re going to grow, and we’re going to throw back to that old R&D term, is this process sustainable? Because we’re going to be looking at our properties and understanding economically. This is a great thing to do because nobody wants their asset to be irresponsibly run. Nobody. Nobody goes, you know, can we just frivolously waste stuff so I can pay more? Nobody has said that. So I think the opportunity for us really comes down to understanding and translating it into dollars. I think that’s going to be the biggest change, and we’ll get to that. Is this process sustainable?

Sean Swentek: Love that. Is this process sustainable? That’s a beautiful way to wrap. This was really an amazing conversation. I’m so grateful to you, Mary, for taking the time. People want to learn more about you or GreenT Climate Software, where should they go?

Mary Nitschke: Go to greenteaclimate.com, or you can look me up on LinkedIn and message me, and we can talk more because this is me abbreviated. I will not stop talking.

Sean Swentek: Yeah. I think we’re going to have to stay in touch and do some more of this in the future because this was really great.

Mary Nitschke: Awesome. I would love that.

Sean Swentek: And thank you listeners for joining us for another episode of the Future of CRE Sustainability. I’m your host, Sean Swentek. Thank you so much for listening.