Dive Brief:
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A beta version of Impact Infrastructure's Autocase for Sustainable Buildings software is now available to show project owners the financial, environmental and social return on the investment in green features for their buildings in real-time, according to Building Design + Construction.
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Impact Infrastructure, a company in which Autodesk is an investor, unveiled the latest rendition of Autocase at the Greenbuild convention in Los Angeles last week, demonstrating how it can analyze building- and location-specific data and then calculate energy savings and other gains.
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The U.S. Green Building Council, which runs the LEED program, also announced that it has instituted a LEED pilot credit for those who use the tool to run what it calls a triple bottom line analysis — assessing a project's financial, social and environmental impact — on their buildings.
Dive Insight:
The Autocase tool intends to help potential LEED participants understand the payoff of LEED certification, particularly when compared to other new green- and wellness-based certification programs. Building owners can use that information to charger higher rents or maintain better occupancy rates, through both new tenant interest and lower turnover among existing ones, according to Impact Infrastructure.
This jibes with a July report from commercial real estate company Bentall Kennedy, which found that LEED-certified buildings in the U.S. are able to realize 3.7% more in lease rates and have a 4% higher occupancy rate than non-certified buildings. Bentall Kennedy's 10-year study also found that Energy Star–certified buildings provided owners with a tidy return as well, with 2.7% higher rents and 9.5% more occupancy. Green features, said the company, also bump up asset value by 8% to 10%.
While most building owners have found the rewards for green-feature implementation reason enough to include them in their buildings' designs, CIT Group's 2016 Commercial Real Estate Outlook survey of real estate executives, released this past July, found that tax credits and grants are the drivers behind more than one-third of decisions to incorporate green design elements.
