Unlocking huge potential of New Zealand's hospitals universities, polytechnics and shopping centres

I am lucky. I came into my role a year ago and an important task had already been undertaken. Our 450 member organisations had already been asked what was needed to make New Zealand’s buildings better. And you told us that you need a tool to evaluate the quality and performance of our existing buildings. Any existing building. 

The New Zealand Green Building Council has spent a year working with members and technical working groups to check a new simple new tool for existing buildings is right for New Zealand. 

We have been training up assessors, and we have checked the tool with a number of organisations. And on 29 November Green Star Performance was launched, to a great reception. Green Star Performance benchmarks the performance of health, university, retail, industrial and other buildings. If a building is occupied it can be assessed.

What does this mean for you? Well, now New Zealand has:

·      a low-cost, robust methodology to evaluate carbon, water use and your policies across your portfolio

·      options to measure the indoor environment, such as air quality, thermal comfort and acoustics, so you can check that your teams have a healthy, productive workplace

·      a common language to compare the performance of offices, schools, shopping centres, industrial, hospitals, or any building.

Feedback on the day was very positive, and assessments are already underway. Owners will undertake the assessment though, of course, if any tenants would like this information, you could start asking for it from your landlord.

The tool has become standard business practice in Australia with 360 buildings being evaluated a year. For this article I thought it useful to contact those who had used the tool before. Marine Calmette, Sustainability Manager, Corporate and Investment Property Frasers Property, one of Australia’s leading property groups had this to say

“We decided to certify our buildings using Green Star Performance because since the beginning we saw the tool would have major long-term benefits to the property industry and building occupants.

“We achieved a portfolio rating representing more than 980,000 m2 of floor space across Australia with 12 commercial buildings and 43 industrial buildings.

“Green Star Performance is really important to our business”

The information required for a rating is the data landlords readily have available. If Green Star Performance is used on offices NABERSNZ, the established energy methodology in New Zealand is used for the energy category.  We know NABERSNZ delivers 30-40% savings on energy bills as shown by the graph above.

The sector though also seems quite excited by the opportunity to finally undertake a comprehensive rating of existing buildings. Including waste, transport and materials means there is a framework to benchmark sustainability initiatives for your business.

Inclusion of indoor environment quality means you can capture wellness indicators improving health and productive for your staff. Harvard University research shows that employees gain a 26% productivity lift in green verified buildings.

Let’s take a conservative approach to the Harvard research and assume a smaller uplift of 10%. Where a District Health Boards or Universities have say 300 staff and an average wage, including on costs of $90,000, an uplift of 10% in productivity is worth $2.6m per year. And this figure is independent from other gains such as reduced absenteeism, staff longevity and reduced sick building syndrome.

A huge thank you @AndreaDavison, @Sam Archer @Ting Xi @Joanne Duggan @Niall Bennett @amy rosser @lena @vivien li and the technical team @davefullbrock, @amanda Bryan @Neil Purdie @saatyesh Bhana @russell Baille @steve ellingford for their work in bringing in the tool and for launching it. We are really proud to be responding to your request. We look forward to seeing Green Star Performance flourish across the health, university, council, industrial, retail sector. 

If you own a building or portfolio, we are able to provide an in-house information session for you and colleagues. info. For a full video of Marine outlining her experience with Green Star Performance see here.

I hope this summary has been useful. I would really value hearing your thoughts. Is it useful to have a tool that covers any existing building? Are the areas covered right?