LOS ANGELES—The UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and UCLA's Institute for the Environment and Sustainability co-hosted the UCLA Green Building Symposium recently, where experts discussed the latest trends in green building. Among the speakers at the event was keynote speaker Jeffrey T. Mezger, president, CEO and director of KB Homes, and panelists Ted Bardake, deputy director of sustainability on the budget and innovation team at the City of Los Angeles; Danielle Horton, founder and principal of Verdani Partners; Adhamina Rodriguez, director of sustainability at Swinerton Builders; and David Hodgins, executive director of L.A. Better Buildings Challenge, who moderated the panel. To delve deeper into the subject, we sat down with panelist Peter Belisle, southwest market director at JLL, to find out about the latest green building trends, the value of green building and what is on the horizon.

GlobeSt.com: What are some of the major trends in green building?

Belisle: People tend to weave everything together, but there really are different goals and objectives. Neither is better or worse than the other. If you are really trying to increase a building's performance, there are tremendous amount of things that can be done behind-the-scenes with the building's mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems that have a material savings of energy and water waste overtime that, in some cases, can be little to no cost but they aren't the glamorous things that are readily visible.