Retailers to get help with 'green' leases

Chipotle's Gurnee Mills store is certified LEED Platinum.

As the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) readies its new rating system for retail spaces, it is working to help prospective retail tenants negotiate “green” leases. When Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Retail comes out of pilot—planned for mid-2010—one of the available resources will be Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED into your Leasing Process, which is being produced by Portland-based Green Building Services.

The nation is poised to see an explosion of leases for retail spaces with sustainability measures, such as sub-metering, written in, according to Ralph DiNola, principal at Green Building Services. “As green building becomes more integrated into common practices … you see that wherever it hasn’t shown up yet, it becomes the topic of the day,” he says. “Now, many are people talking about greening leases. It’s one of the last bastions of business as usual.”

The opportunity for making the retail building market more sustainable is large. This community commands more than 67 percent of the existing buildings market, according to USGBC.

The new guide is planned to fill a niche that the wide variety of “green” lease guides and templates on the market don’t cover, says Nina Tallering, senior consultant and manager of verification and program development for Green Building Services. In the commercial office and residential sectors, leases tend to be pretty standard and renters operate in just one market. Retail leases vary greatly from site to site and renters often operate across [sites], she says. As a result, “This guide is not about lease language, it’s a lot about the process,” she says.

Large retailers are leading the way toward “green” leases, so the guide is focused on the tenant perspective, DiNola says. “It’s targeted to serve the tenant…but landlords could use it to know where the tenant is coming from.”