We spoke with Ellis about the collaboration, what it means for each of the firms and ultimately for CRE.

GlobeSt.com: What does this collaboration mean for the individual organizations involved?

Ellis: One of the things Greenprint is focused on is sustainability in the built environment. It's difficult to advance in this without a data-management solution; that's where Measurabl enters the picture. We can aggregate data across an enormous set of buildings and bring visibility and transparency around environmental and social impacts. This gels with ULI's mission, and they are now in a position to deliver best practices around that. Now that ULI has benchmarks, etc., it can do what it does best: advance the industry. They're getting a best-in-class platform and they're able to do their job.

For Measurabl, it's the yin and the yang. We're a software company, but what we look to ULI for now is leadership. What is an investment-grade sustainability score? ULI is uniquely equipped to answer that question, to say, “Here's what we think matters for our membership.” They are the premier thinkers for this. So, we can write code with one of the shops that has an ear to the ground on what investors need.

GlobeSt.com: What does it ultimately mean for CRE?

Ellis: It's significant for a number of reasons. This partnership is a marker on a major shift in CRE markets globally. Five or six years ago, this notion that real estate owners would measure, manage and report on their environmental impacts really took hold. Investors are comparing funds against funds, and institutional investors began using these scores and rankings to allocate billions of dollars. In the scheme of real estate, in about five years this escalated to core fundamental business management. It was an existential crisis, and sustainability became the core issue. That is what changed over the last five years; the conversation evolved quickly and is only going farther and faster now.

We're seeing a lot of regulation, not just investors—not only at the federal level, but also at the state and municipal levels. You can't sell a building if you can't provide this data. The second you had these two things come together—investor mandates and regulation—you saw the temperature rise on sustainability. The third leg was the tenants/occupiers. I came from CBRE, and we were seeing RFPs for space come in that had “green lease” clauses: Is your building energy scored or LEED Platinum? The tenants were saying, “For us to be competitive, we have to step it up.” So, the investors, regulators and tenants themselves gave a triple whammy on ownership, and they needed systems to do it.

Greenprint is trying to revolutionize it and make it possible for all markets around the world to compare ownerships on carbon output, sustainability performance and how that drives occupants and insurance rates. They want to bring a new and improved lens to operational best practices. This will raise the bar on what they have to do to compete in the market and be successful.

GlobeSt.com: Are there other partnerships you are working on or can envision for Measurabl?

Ellis: Yes, substantially so. I'm not at liberty to go into them. But what's cool about ULI is it's one of the preeminent organizations of its time. It has a global reach and a membership roster that includes the crème de la crème of the industry. They drive top-down leadership.

A lot of groups are interested in the sustainability issue. We have a chance to really be the core of how these owners measure, manage and report.

GlobeSt.com: What direction is sustainability in the built environment moving toward, and what is the next step?

Ellis: I think what's going to happen is you'll continue to see it elevated and tracked by CEOs and CFOs. It will elevate to a core KPI; you will need the deployment of IT systems like ours to measure, manage and report it, and that will become the new status quo. Right now, it really was leaders and progressive shops doing this, but now it's becoming status quo with the mid-market. We will see leaders try to find new ground and a lot more penetration come to mid-market companies. There's a data revolution in measuring what matters. We made it affordable and easy—a couple dollars per building per month—and once we broke the cost and complexity barriers, boom.

SAN DIEGO— Urban Land Institute Greenprint Center for Building Performance's collaboration with sustainability-software company Measurabl indicates the future of sustainability is becoming ever more sophisticated and accessible to owners of buildings of all sizes, Measurabl's CEO and founder Matt Ellis tells GlobeSt.com. The collaborative effort between Greenprint and Measurabl will improve sustainability and building performance tracking for more than 20,000 commercial buildings covering 3.7 billion square feet around the globe. These properties constitute the collective portfolio of Greenprint members and Measurabl subscribers, who together represent the world's largest database of sustainability-focused commercial real estate owners and investors.

Greenprint is a global consortium of leading real estate owners, investors and strategic partners committed to improving the environmental performance of the real estate industry through value-enhancing strategies. In the past six years, Greenprint members have decreased energy consumption by 13.7%, greenhouse-gas emissions by 16.5% and water use by 10.9%, saving $42 million in utility costs in this past year alone.

Measurabl is a widely adopted sustainability software for real estate. Greenprint and Measurabl's work supports the principle that what is not measured cannot be managed. Ellis says the collaboration is “a testament not only to the quality of our platform, but also to our shared mission of empowering organizations with investment-grade data and sustainability solutions.” The collaboration was established in part to reduce the complexity of sustainability data collection, management and reporting. Moving forward, the combined scale of both entities aims to provide the real estate industry a range of unique benefits including investment-grade sustainability benchmarks for buildings and portfolios, as well as incomparable insight into relative performance benchmarks and trends.

Buildings are responsible for 40% of energy consumption, 25% of water consumption, and 33% of total global greenhouse-gas emissions. Consequently, the built environment has a key role to play in improving sustainability and mitigating climate change. According to the firms, the new partnership will ensure that Greenprint members, who collectively manage over a $1 trillion in assets, have the most advanced data collection and reporting tools available.

We spoke with Ellis about the collaboration, what it means for each of the firms and ultimately for CRE.

GlobeSt.com: What does this collaboration mean for the individual organizations involved?

Ellis: One of the things Greenprint is focused on is sustainability in the built environment. It's difficult to advance in this without a data-management solution; that's where Measurabl enters the picture. We can aggregate data across an enormous set of buildings and bring visibility and transparency around environmental and social impacts. This gels with ULI's mission, and they are now in a position to deliver best practices around that. Now that ULI has benchmarks, etc., it can do what it does best: advance the industry. They're getting a best-in-class platform and they're able to do their job.

For Measurabl, it's the yin and the yang. We're a software company, but what we look to ULI for now is leadership. What is an investment-grade sustainability score? ULI is uniquely equipped to answer that question, to say, “Here's what we think matters for our membership.” They are the premier thinkers for this. So, we can write code with one of the shops that has an ear to the ground on what investors need.

GlobeSt.com: What does it ultimately mean for CRE?

Ellis: It's significant for a number of reasons. This partnership is a marker on a major shift in CRE markets globally. Five or six years ago, this notion that real estate owners would measure, manage and report on their environmental impacts really took hold. Investors are comparing funds against funds, and institutional investors began using these scores and rankings to allocate billions of dollars. In the scheme of real estate, in about five years this escalated to core fundamental business management. It was an existential crisis, and sustainability became the core issue. That is what changed over the last five years; the conversation evolved quickly and is only going farther and faster now.

We're seeing a lot of regulation, not just investors—not only at the federal level, but also at the state and municipal levels. You can't sell a building if you can't provide this data. The second you had these two things come together—investor mandates and regulation—you saw the temperature rise on sustainability. The third leg was the tenants/occupiers. I came from CBRE, and we were seeing RFPs for space come in that had “green lease” clauses: Is your building energy scored or LEED Platinum? The tenants were saying, “For us to be competitive, we have to step it up.” So, the investors, regulators and tenants themselves gave a triple whammy on ownership, and they needed systems to do it.

Greenprint is trying to revolutionize it and make it possible for all markets around the world to compare ownerships on carbon output, sustainability performance and how that drives occupants and insurance rates. They want to bring a new and improved lens to operational best practices. This will raise the bar on what they have to do to compete in the market and be successful.

GlobeSt.com: Are there other partnerships you are working on or can envision for Measurabl?

Ellis: Yes, substantially so. I'm not at liberty to go into them. But what's cool about ULI is it's one of the preeminent organizations of its time. It has a global reach and a membership roster that includes the crème de la crème of the industry. They drive top-down leadership.

A lot of groups are interested in the sustainability issue. We have a chance to really be the core of how these owners measure, manage and report.

GlobeSt.com: What direction is sustainability in the built environment moving toward, and what is the next step?

Ellis: I think what's going to happen is you'll continue to see it elevated and tracked by CEOs and CFOs. It will elevate to a core KPI; you will need the deployment of IT systems like ours to measure, manage and report it, and that will become the new status quo. Right now, it really was leaders and progressive shops doing this, but now it's becoming status quo with the mid-market. We will see leaders try to find new ground and a lot more penetration come to mid-market companies. There's a data revolution in measuring what matters. We made it affordable and easy—a couple dollars per building per month—and once we broke the cost and complexity barriers, boom.