With operational costs at a premium, many commercial building managers are seeing financial opportunity in environmental performance. One beneficiary from the green boom? Building assessment providers like Boston-based VFA, which recently added an environmental benchmarking service to its suite of offerings. In this SLM interview, VFA’s Lisa Raffin explains who's leading and who's lagging in the green-building race – and why property managers are often caught in the middle. (To listen to our conversation with Lisa, click here.)

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SLM: Lisa, at what point did VFA begin offering green building assessments and what was the rationale behind the decision?

Lisa: We began offering green building assessment in 2007, but it really came out of several years of experience working with clients who were looking for ways to boost resource efficiency within their real estate portfolios. Given the industry's current trend toward green, we chose to formalize these kinds of assessments into a more holistic, comprehensive service that focuses on transforming existing buildings into higher-performing, more sustainable properties.

SLM: So is the green assessment a completely separate service or have green assessments been incorporated into your standard offering?

Lisa: The green building assessment is currently a separate service. It can serve as a standalone in which we evaluate a building strictly according to environmental performance, or it can supplement another kind of assessment, such as for building reuse or long-term planning. Ultimately, though, I believe that we'll need to incorporate identifying green opportunities into all of our standard assessment services.

At this point, customers' definitions of green really differ from market to market. It's such an emerging and fast-moving trend we see a lot of variation across our customer base in terms of how they'd like to go about achieving their green goals.

SLM: Are there some sectors that seem more interested in green building than others? Does it break down by geographic location?

Lisa: Some market sectors and geographic regions are definitely more active than others on this issue. One of the most active sectors is the federal government, which is responding to an executive order that mandates 15% of buildings comply with high performance goals by 2015. Federal agencies are lining up to figure out how they're going to meet or even exceed that goal. That's also true at the state level - many state governments have legislated their own green building targets. The West Coast in particular tends to be ahead of the rest of the country on that.

Green building performance standards aren't mandated for the commercial sector, obviously, but increasingly companies looking to sustainability as a source of competitive and financial benefits. In terms of real estate that means lower utility costs and higher property values.

SLM: TIAA-CREF's recent pledge to reduce energy use by 10% across its entire commercial real estate portfolio is a great example of a company viewing green building as a source of financial benefit. It seems that between government mandates and top-down pledges from large property owners, there are probably a lot of building managers and operators out there who are "lining up" to figure out how to meet those green goals but just don't know where to begin.

Lisa: Certainly the most requests are coming in from those organizational departments that are tasked with managing these facilities. VFA's contacts tend to be with the corporate real estate group or the facility management group or even the strategic planning group, and it's true that a lot of them feel caught in the middle. They're looking at the myriad sources of information on green building techniques, products, and technologies and wondering how they're going to sift through it all to figure out what they should commit to. Keep in mind, facility managers are charged not just with basic building services but also with security, disaster planning, and other complex issues. It's no wonder that they need some help.

SLM: What kind of feedback do you get from customers?

Lisa: Oftentimes we'll hear that customers are taking the money they save through green building measures and plowing those funds back into more capital improvement projects. It can take a number of years for companies to recoup their initial investments in building efficiency - especially for the more high-tech approaches - but companies are quick to re-up their commitment to green building practices once the long-term benefits have been established.

SLM: What's next for the green building market and the facility managers tasked with improving environmental performance?

Lisa: This is not going to be your typical real-estate bubble. It really does seem that there's incredible momentum for green building, not only for new constructions but also for existing buildings that tend to pose the most significant - and not necessarily glamorous - challenges. It's not that everyone is moving in lock-step on these issues. It's more that everyone seems to be committing to doing at least something in this direction. That's what makes this a long-term trend.