The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) developed the LEED program to help encourage commercial developers and investors to build and buy green. LEED certification, however, has left much to be desired in the past ten years, and now that the program itself is facing a class action suit for failing to deliver greener, more efficient and cost-effective buildings, many metropolitan areas and commercial property owners are turning to other options when it comes to determining just how green – if at all – a property may be. A few of the solutions include energy report cards (New York) and simple year-over-year cost analysis to evaluate the efficacy of green “improvements” on a property[1].

There are two main problems with LEED certification. First of all, the certification usually costs about $100,000 to obtain, and it can be even more costly. Second of all, the certification does not require the building to show energy efficiency or any other type of monetary or environmental benefits to the owner. It simply requires that the building meet a certain set of projections about environmental friendliness. While proponents of the system insist that “LEEDS has made people realize the importance of looking at how buildings are affecting the environment,” more and more detractors are insisting that just looking at the environment is not enough. “More people want to see quantitative data that show they are saving money,” said president of Malkin Holdings, Anthony Malkin, who owns part of the Empire State Building and manages its assets. Malkin recently completed a green renovation of the Empire State Building designed to lower energy consumption by 38 percent, which may or may not garner the building a LEED rating but will certainly save Malkin and his co-investors serious money in energy costs.

Now that LEED is facing a suit from building owners and developers claiming that they were pushed to add “costly components that do not necessarily lower energy costs or benefit the environment,” it is likely that more property owners and developers are going to start taking Malkin’s approach in the future. It is no longer enough to promote “green living” as an abstract concept that tenants of a building can brag about; in the future green improvements will need to have a tangible impact on the budget of a building as well.

Would you pay for LEED certification in your preferred commercial market?

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