Transwestern and Sustainability: On to the Next Step

HOUSTON-During the early 2000s, when Transwestern was first recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for introducing sustainability activities into its managed commercial real estate office building portfolio, the idea of “going green” wasn’t recognized as mandatory.  Furthermore, complying with benchmarks such as Energy Star or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design were considered too costly or difficult to implement by many property owners and managers.

What a differences nine years makes. “There’s more of a consciousness on the part of owners,” says Transwestern managing senior vice president-director of sustainability Al Skodowski. “The Energy Star label is one of those things that’s instantly recognizable, whether it’s on a refrigerator or a building.”

Locally based Transwestern is highly familiar with tools of the green trade and that familiarity won the company the EPA’s 2012 Energy Star Sustained Excellence Award. Transwestern has been an EPA Energy Star partner for close to a decade, and has received awards since the mid-2000s for utilizing resources to boost Energy Star scores in its managed office building portfolio. Skodowski tells Globest.com that it’s time to move on to the next step.  

“We can only do the same thing over and over again for so long,” he explains. “Our portfolio score, on average, is quite high – when we first started this process, it was in the 60s, and now, on average, the portfolio is in the 80s.” It helps to keep in mind that an Energy Star rating of 50 represents a building’s average energy usage – the higher the score, the more efficient the building is in energy usage.

What, then, is Transwestern’s next step? Skodowski says the company has a couple of things in the works, one of which is working with other companies – such as Kohler Co., the plumbing hardware folks -- to develop a water rating system; one that measures consumption in a building and all its subsystems. Once that system has been worked out and vetted by industry professionals, “our hope is to literally hand that to the EPA,” Skodowski  says. In 2013, other industry experts will be involved in putting together a waste/recycling component similar to that of Energy Star, with Transwestern involved with that as well.

But a major initiative Transwestern is working toward involves energy ratings on industrial properties it manages. Doing this Skodowski says, is a lot more complex than working on the office building side; for one thing, thanks to triple-net leases, the tenants, not the owners, are paying the utility bills.  Furthermore, “industrial buildings are staffed dramatically differently than those in office buildings,” Skodowski comments. Ongoing maintenance in industrial buildings is different than that in office buildings, he adds, as is resource allocation.

As such, the goal right now for the industrial properties is education about energy efficiencies. “We’re learning through the process,” Skodowski  acknowledges. “We’re not going to have all of them done immediately, but we can take what we’ve learned and help educate the industry.”