WASHINGTON, DC—Fannie Mae is making a number of tweaks to various programs to better promote and publicize its green MBS, a type of security that the GSE has been quietly marketing for the last year and a half. Fannie Mae has sold about $129 million of green MBS-tagged securities over the last year to DUS investors and now it hopes to expand the security's reach by appealing to institutional investors and funds with a socially-aware mandate, Donna Varner, manager of the Multifamily Green Initiative at Fannie Mae, tells GlobeSt.com. Fannie Mae's new measures include:

• collaborating with the US Environmental Protection Agency to develop an ENERGY STAR score for existing multifamily properties;

• forming partnerships with private sector lenders and one New York state agency to support a pilot project called M-PIRE, which will, when it gets off the ground, allow for potential energy savings to be underwritten in the loan, thus permitting an increase in the loan amount which funds the improvements in the property;

• changing one program to allow a borrower to take cash out of a green loan after equity has accumulated.

It is not a bad laundry list for a mandate-financing for environmental improvements in multifamily properties-that was only established in 2010. "We have progressed to do some very interesting things," Varner says. The EPA initiative will be important because it will give the finance industry a simple way to understand energy performance in multifamily properties, she says.

Briefly, as GlobeSt.com reported last week, the EPA's new green rating system for multifamily housing will be available this fall. The multifamily score will be a part of its ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager Tool, and will enable owners and managers to benchmark the energy performance of their multifamily buildings.

"There wasn't anything out there that allowed the finance industry to understand what the property and energy industries meant by energy efficiency," Varner says.