Abundance Blog
News and ideas from Paladino's team of industry leaders.
An Introduction to Energy Audits
By Brad Greeff
It’s no surprise that the occupancy of commercial office buildings looks dramatically different as a result of COVID-19. The unexpected upside is that lower occupancy creates an ideal opportunity to conduct an energy audit for your building. What is an…
Substantiating Building Performance: Energy & Water Benchmarking with Arc & ENERGY STAR
While predictive modeling for energy and water is an important part of the real estate development process, it’s equally important to substantiate building performance once the building is operational. In this post, I will introduce sustainability benchmarking with Arc and…
What property owners should do now that ENERGY STAR may have pulled back
By Darren Bruce
When the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last August that it was going to update its ENERGY STAR rating system, the reaction was positive overall. After all, the 26-year-old rating system, which generates scores of one to 100 to…
Five changes to GRESB that every participating company should know about
In 2017, 850 property companies and funds, jointly representing more than $3.7T in assets under management, participated in the GRESB Real Estate Assessment. And more than 70 institutional and retail investors use GRESB data and analytical tools to engage with…
ENERGY STAR scoring is about to change
ENERGY STAR compares a building’s energy performance to that of similar buildings nationwide, and buildings have become more energy efficient in recent years. This is good news! It also means that if you benchmark properties in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager,…
Let’s discuss the ENERGY STAR Multifamily High-Rise Program
By Brian Walker
The Multifamily Residential Market Economy In a construction market that has been slowly recovering since the end of The Great Recession, multifamily housing has been the brightest star. The demand for rental housing has been on a steady climb since…
Energy audits can fool-proof your CapEx budget
Energy audits are the best kept secret of smart facilities and operations managers. The central goal for CapEx budgeting is to figure out the best way to spend your company’s financial resources to optimize a building’s performance – financial and otherwise.…
Two Liberty Center goes for the Gold—and wins
Two Liberty Center, an Arlington, Virginia, mixed-use development with office space, residences, and retail, has been committed to sustainability since its opening in 2007. The property has achieved ENERGY STAR certification; was awarded the 2010 Award for Excellence by the…
Lessons Learned from Paladino's LEED v4 Gold Rating
By Brad Pease and Megan Snyder
Just in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Paladino and Company, our headquarters office in Seattle has become the first LEED v4 certified project in the Northwest. We achieved a Gold rating using the LEED Commercial interiors program. It…
Energy Efficient Buildings Increase Financial Performance
By Brad Pease
The verdict is in. Green buildings do improve financial performance of properties, reports the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in its recently released report Energy Efficiency & Financial Performance: a Review of Studies in the Market. The report was designed to…