Feature image: The LEED Platinum AMLI Buckhead in Atlanta, adjacent to the AMLI-developed, 1.5-acre Marie Sims Park. Photo courtesy of AMLI.

USGBC · USGBC+ Winter 2023: Using LEED to build sustainably at scale

It’s well known that LEED accelerates changes in the market. As project owners and developers push their teams to meet certification standards, those teams seek out environmentally friendly vendors, and suppliers begin offering new products that require less carbon to produce, incorporate more recycled content and do more than previous products to promote healthy indoor spaces.

Less discussed, perhaps, is the impact that pursuing LEED certification can have on an individual company—especially one that pursues certification across all assets. For these developers, sustainability is a cornerstone of their corporate culture. While there are certainly challenges associated with certifying millions of square feet of space, these companies are often able to unlock efficiencies of scale that help them to do more and do it more quickly.

Here, sustainability leaders at three large real estate companies share the strategies, challenges and results associated with implementation of LEED.

AMLI

In 2006, leaders at multifamily developer, manager and owner AMLI Residential committed to pursuing LEED certification for all new developments going forward. That pledge led to its first certification at AMLI 900 in Chicago’s South Loop in 2010.

Fast-forward to today, and AMLI has developed 50 LEED-certified apartment communities, which includes a few communities that AMLI has since sold. LEED properties now represent more than 60% of its entire portfolio.

The strategy of scaling AMLI’s LEED portfolio is driven by a combination of investors’ need to prepare for the future and internal stakeholders’ desire to build the best buildings possible, says Erin Hatcher, LEED AP BD+C, vice president of sustainability. She credits the effort with creating a common language and set of expectations around sustainability within AMLI.

A large multistory office building with many windows. — AMLI 900 in Chicago was the company's first LEED property, certified in 2010. Photo courtesy of AMLI.

“Our leadership saw that sustainability was the future,” says Hatcher. “There was growing awareness in the multifamily space, and they saw this as an opportunity for us to differentiate and also learn how to build a higher-quality product that was going to be better for our residents. They saw LEED as the gold standard.”

“It has given the sustainability conversation a higher level of priority than it ever had before, and it’s making it easier for us to assign value to sustainable design,” Hatcher adds. “Individual grassroots initiatives have their place and are supported internally. But our LEED standard creates a foundation where we’re going to do this as a minimum across all of our properties, and it creates enthusiasm.”

AMLI uses data from resident sustainability surveys to help make decisions about the company’s initiatives. For example, the company enhanced its recycling rooms based on resident feedback—making them bigger and brighter, with improved signage.

The company continues to pivot based on best practices and market demands. For instance, AMLI has a goal of accommodating electric vehicle hookups in at least 30% of parking spots by 2030, but Hatcher suspects that the company may increase its target if adoption accelerates.

A modern kitchen in a penthouse with a wall of windows — Left: The LEED Gold AMLI Fountain Place in Dallas. Right: An electric vehicle charging at AMLI Park Broadway in Long Beach, California. Photos courtesy of AMLI.

A small white electric vehicle charging in a parking garage. — Left: The LEED Gold AMLI Fountain Place in Dallas. Right: An electric vehicle charging at AMLI Park Broadway in Long Beach, California. Photos courtesy of AMLI.

“We don’t know exactly what the timeline is going to look like, but we have to prepare,” she says.

Hatcher admits their strategy to focus on solid, repeatable processes is not as exciting as features that create a bit of marketing buzz. However, it drives predictable, scalable results for investors and residents.

“We’re a really process-oriented company,” she says. “The way we’ve approached LEED certification is not by having a lot of over-the-top features. It’s been about committing to a process from the start. When we kick off projects, from the time we’re looking at the land and purchasing it, we’re talking about what level of LEED certification we're going to get, making that commitment to our investors and then strategizing how exactly we’re going to accomplish that. We’ve integrated it so deeply into our process, it’s just the way we do business now.”

AMLI survey responses

More than 4,000 residents responded to AMLI’s 2022 sustainability survey.

80% said living in an apartment with green features is beneficial to their health.
65% of residents work from home at least part of the time.
92% of residents recycle.
88% of residents say they’re concerned about climate change.
56% expect to be driving an electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid within five years.

Kilroy

When Kilroy Realty Corporation first started pursuing certification over 10 years ago, the company had to educate tenants and leasing agents about the value of LEED, says Sarah King, LEED Green Associate, senior vice president of sustainability. Today, she says, LEED has become “table stakes.”

“At one point, having a LEED-certified building was a real differentiator, and something that we could use as a point of entry with tenants who had similar values in terms of sustainability,” King says. “Today, it’s become so familiar that we need to talk not just about the certification, but also about what strategies we’re implementing to achieve LEED.”

Pursuing LEED at scale certainly has its challenges, especially for companies like Kilroy that operate across a wide geographical area. Such companies must figure out how to develop LEED facilities within a number of different building codes, as well as how to source sustainable products in a variety of markets. However, Kilroy’s size also allows the company to experiment with new approaches, and then to scale out the solutions that work best.

Residents of an apartment community relax on a rooftop deck. — The LEED Platinum 100 Hooper in San Francisco. Photo credit: Lawrence Anderson.

“We’re long-term owners, so we have the ability to stay with a building for multiple decades and really fine-tune the building operations,” King says. “We directly manage all of our buildings, and that close proximity to the assets and the tenants helps us determine the ongoing operational policies that we need to maintain to keep our focus on energy, carbon, water and waste.”

“It’s nice to have a portfolio the size of Kilroy’s, where you can look across it and figure out the best place to test something,” King adds. “We find the right building and right context where we can get the right information, and then we figure out if it makes sense to deploy at scale.”

For instance, Kilroy’s innovation lab tested the use of infrared inspection to identify leaks in HVAC systems, then used the technology (along with an LED lighting retrofit) to achieve a 9% energy use reduction at the Sunset Media Center building in Hollywood.

A woman walks along a breezeway between two red brick buildings — The LEED Platinum 2100 Kettner in San Diego. Photo credit: Lawrence Anderson.

A grouping of buildings diverse in size, style and material together on one block. — The LEED Platinum 2100 Kettner in San Diego. Photo credit: Lawrence Anderson.

The scale of Kilroy’s holdings gives the company a familiarity with managing tools like low-flow water fixtures, King says, and it also allows it to drive change across a number of markets. For example, King notes, materials like concrete are typically sourced locally, and vendors have begun offering products with lower levels of embodied carbon—along with environmental product declarations—in response to requests from developers.

The company has issued green bonds to finance some of its ground-up new development, King says, and it has a multimillion-dollar annual sustainability budget to fund efficiency and carbon reduction projects across the stabilized portfolio. In 2020, the company achieved its goal of becoming Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon-neutral via a mix of energy efficiency initiatives, on-site and offsite renewables, renewable energy certificates, and carbon offsets. Also, the company’s commitment to a virtual power purchase agreement was instrumental in the creation of a 2,000-acre, third-party-owned solar array that is currently under construction, King says.

Another factor driving scale for publicly traded companies like Kilroy is the evolving expectations of investors. “They’re very interested in what we’re doing around sustainability, and they have very smart ESG-focused people on their staff,” King says. “More and more, sustainability is a mainstream investment issue.”

Kilroy certification by region

At the end of 2021, Kilroy had 11.8 million square feet of LEED-certified space, accounting for 73% of the company’s total portfolio.

Seattle: 2.7 million square feet
Greater Los Angeles: 2.8 million square feet
Austin: 734,000 square feet
San Francisco Bay Area: 4.7 million square feet
San Diego: 858,000 square feet

A note from the board

In a July 2022 open letter, the USGBC and GBCI boards outlined the importance of driving performance at scale. Among the boards’ main points:

Portfolio progress will vary depending on factors like baseline conditions, budget, stakeholder expectations and industry culture, but tools like LEED and Arc can help all portfolio owners to set and track targets for performance improvement.
LEED certification at scale is an effective way for companies to prove their commitment to sustainability, social equity, health and well-being, and climate resilience.
Rapid scaling of green building is critical in a world where the effects of climate change are already being felt, and where communities are in need of equitable and healthy places to live and work.

Lendlease

Lendlease’s portfolio of multifamily developments has been verified net zero, and each property has obtained LEED Gold certification. At any given time, the company is working on 30 to 50 major construction projects for third-party clients (headliner projects include the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the restoration of the Statue of Liberty), and many of those clients are requesting LEED buildings.

“It’s what wins us work,” says Sara Neff, head of sustainability at the company and a LEED Fellow with four LEED AP specialty credentials. “When we’re trying to win business with a client that has sustainability aspirations, they want to come to Lendlease. They see our track record with sustainability and LEED—and they look at our environmental targets, which are the most ambitious in the world—and they feel comfortable that they’re in good hands.”

People rest in chairs overlooking the waterfront, with an apartment building in the background. — The Clippership Wharf in Boston. Photo courtesy of Lendlease.

LEED success at scale depends on a number of drivers and strategies, Neff says. Although Lendlease’s focus on sustainability dates back to the early 1970s, investors have ramped up pressure around environmental goals in recent years, creating an incentive for developers to accelerate their green building initiatives. Tenants are increasingly aware of green building standards, Neff says, but it’s still important for operators to work with leasing agents who speak the language of sustainability and can explain why green features are important to the health, safety and productivity of occupants. Developers need to bake green building into their culture to ramp up their progress, Neff notes, but that progress also helps to reinforce sustainability as a core cultural value.

“It’s really important for a company to broadcast its sustainability goals and make them part of the brand,” Neff says. “Because then what happens, the people who come into the company know that sustainability is important. That’s why they’re coming to the company, and they’re very excited to work on it and come up with ideas. Then, you get more wins, and you have more to talk about, and it becomes an even more integral part of the brand. It’s this beautiful, virtuous cycle.”

A green roof with wildflowers on a tall building — Green roof at the LEED Gold Cooper at Southbank in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Lendlease.

To create green buildings at scale, Neff notes, developers must constantly evolve and keep an open mind about their approaches. She says that she’s been “shocked” at how quickly concrete and steel are decarbonizing, for instance, and she recently changed her mind about the difficulty of creating all-electric buildings in cold climates after seeing successful examples in Scandinavia and Japan.

“The pace of innovation is really exciting, and we can’t fall back on business as usual,” Neff says. “It’s important to question the assumptions that we have based on projects from two or three years ago, and to drive change going forward.”

Lendlease data point

42%: The portion of Lendlease’s global electricity use that came from renewable sources in the 2022 fiscal year. The company is targeting 100% renewables by 2030.

LEED volume certification

For organizations with highly repeatable designs—such as retailers and companies in the industrial sector—LEED volume certification offers a streamlined certification process that helps them to achieve certification at massive scales.

The program leverages prototype designs, which companies can use to apply a set of LEED credits across a group of projects that have major elements in common. The program is aimed at organizations that plan to register at least 25 similar projects over a period of three years.

Thirty-seven prototypes have been pre-certified under LEED v4, and nearly 1,900 projects totaling 240 million square feet have achieved LEED v4 certification. (When LEED 2009 is included, the volume program has certified more than 6,000 projects totaling more than 600 million square feet.) McDonald’s has certified 1,800 stores in China alone through LEED volume.

The LEED volume program fee includes an ongoing engagement with GBCI, featuring streamlined certification, preapproved LEED strategies, dedicated reviewers and account managers, and customized workshops.

“The biggest benefit of the of the volume program is how involved and collaborative the GBCI review teams are with the owners,” says Amy Gallo, program manager for LEED volume. “That collaborative effort is really what makes this program special.”

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Using LEED to build sustainably at scale