How you can help tenants get to net zero

how you can help tenants get to net zero

Sustainability can be a service offering, just like coworking companies stock the staff fridge with craft beers and handle your mail.

Once the workplace solution for sexy start-ups and footloose freelancers, coworking is now an innovation strategy in the corporate world.

The number of coworking enterprises continues to accelerate rapidly as large telcos and tech giants – Verizon, IBM, Microsoft and Google among them – move employees to incubator spaces to head off industry disruptors.

What better way to keep an eye on potential market agitators, poach top talent and monitor potential acquisition targets, all the while reducing your real estate costs?

Premium building owners are scrutinising companies like WeWork, which has chalked up a 90 per cent growth rate in enterprise clients in the last year alone. And they are asking: how can we bring coworking principles into our offering?

This approach may appeal to top tier tenants. But the mass middle – the companies with 20 to 100 employees who are too busy struggling with their clunky IT systems to be worried about yoga rooms and healthy eating policies – just want to get the work done and the bills paid.

And those bills are getting bigger. The financial controllers and accounts payable clerks in these companies can expect another series of nasty shocks this year as energy prices rise rapidly in the first half of this year.

But sustainability can be a service offering, in much the same way coworking companies stock the staff fridge with craft beers and handle your mail.

Lendlease’s eco-concierge at Barangaroo South points to the potential of this value-add service in middle markets. The eco-concierge works with every commercial and retail tenant – all 80 of them – throughout the precinct to realise Lendlease’s carbon neutral ambitions. Lendlease understands that ultimately it is the people who use the place who determine whether it is sustainable.

We know that building owners are ready to provide a suite of services to tenants, whether that’s guiding the NABERS rating process or helping to choose the right fit-out contractors.

But one of the property sector’s core and perhaps overlooked strengths is our engagement with the energy market. Large landlords don’t just understand solar panels and battery storage. They also understand how to negotiate energy contracts to extract the best value for tenants.

The opportunity for members of the BBP is clear: it’s time to help mid-sized tenants reap the rewards of energy efficiency and aggregated procurement at scale. We can use our hard-won expertise to lead our tenants towards a net zero carbon future.

So, forget the free beer and ping pong tables. The real value for tenants will be found in sustainability as a service.