What are the advantages for a commercial building owner to consider a green approach?
August 11, 2010
The following is a reply to a discussion started by Galouzi Makrem of the “Building Green-Sustainability Group” on Linked in.
“Lets shelve the word Green. Let’s use a real world term–”Sustainable.” Any commercial building owner, meaning the building is theirs, lock, stock and barrel, has to look at their investment simply as initial cost, operational and maintenance costs over the life of the investment and then residual worth. While that initial cost may be somewhat higher–it doesn’t have to be–if preplanned, not reactive planned. For sure the maintenance and operational costs over say 15 years should be substantially less than a building built strictly to code. The residual value of a sustainable building should be substantially more than some cheap thing thrown up. Take them all together and you have the real reason to build sustainably–economics. It is called Life Cycle analysis and utilized with common sense, it makes economic sense. ”
“Multi-family apartment owners have been analyzing return on investment using this approach for years. Usually in order to get financing they unrealistically minimized maintenance and operational costs, especially during the years of cheap energy. They also usually ended up with a building in need of substantial repair, so their residual value was minimized. Today looking at all these things realistically screams for a sustainable approach.”
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