Seeing the Investor Value in Being Green

By ALISON GREGOR

Published: March 2, 2010

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The overhaul involves fixes as simple as installing low-flow water fixtures and as complex as revamping heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Jamestown expects to recoup costs through energy savings, the ability to charge higher rents and higher resale values.

Jamestown, an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta, has invested $12 billion in commercial properties in the United States since 1983 through private equity funds for German investors. Matt M. Bronfman, the company’s managing director and chief operations officer, said Jamestown’s executives believed that real estate holdings, new and existing, would be increasingly valued by their sustainability and environmental impact.

“We come at things from a bit of a European perspective, and Europe is far ahead of the United States in the environmental movement,” Mr. Bronfman said. Sustainability “will become a key factor to the point where, if you haven’t taken environmental measures, you will have trouble, whether it’s leasing your office building or what have you,” he added. The company said it would spend $3 million to $10 million to retrofit all of its properties.

Jamestown invests through private equity funds. There may be several dozen public and private green building funds worldwide, said Gary Pivo, director of the Responsible Property Investing Center at the University of Arizona and a professor of urban planning and natural resources. Prominent ones include the Investa Commercial Property Fund, based in Australia, and the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund I, based in New York. “There are an increasing number of private funds that are incorporating green buildings and energy-efficient buildings and other principles of sustainability into their property selections and their portfolios,” Mr. Pivo said. “But there are not very many that are committed exclusively to green buildings.”

In December 2008, Jamestown acquired Green Street Properties, a development and consulting firm in Atlanta that focused on environmental sustainability. It will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Jamestown.

Jamestown “saw us as a way of accelerating the greening of their brand and portfolio,” said Katharine Kelley, who retained her position as president and chief executive of Green Street. “One of the first things we did after joining forces was to start work immediately on a number of existing buildings in Jamestown’s portfolio.”

One building where the conversion is virtually complete is 999 Peachtree Street, a 621,000-square-foot office building with street-level retail space in midtown Atlanta, acquired through the Jamestown Co-Invest IV fund in 2007 for $127 million.

Jamestown has obtained gold certification from the United States Green Building Council with various strategies, like starting bicycle sharing and carpooling programs, and adding a Zipcar station. Energy-efficient lighting saves 476,000 kilowatt hours a year, and the building recycles paper and uses sustainable Post-it notes and file folders.

Tenants in the building, including ERS Global and Flad Architects, follow sustainable practices, said Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s creative director. “I would say we look kindly on tenant build-outs or interior choices that are green,” Mr. Phillips said. “But I don’t think it’s a requirement.”

The goal with 999 Peachtree is to hold it for the duration of the closed-end Co-Invest IV fund, which is seven to 10 years, benefiting from reduced operating costs that may also attract tenants who will pay a bit more, Mr. Phillips said.

Rents for green offices have been shown to be about 2 percent higher than rents for comparable buildings nearby, according to a study done by John M. Quigley, an economist and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and two other researchers.

When the fund closes, Jamestown will sell 999 Peachtree, but it is difficult to tell how much the building’s conversion and certification will add to its valuation, Mr. Phillips said. Since green building funds have been around only for a half-dozen years or so, few if any of their assets have sold, he said.

“It depends on who buys the investment at the end,” Mr. Phillips said. “An insurance company or pension fund typically wants to buy buildings that offer the most modern technology. Green technology is considered the most progressive.

“At the moment,” he continued, “the advantages of being green might be less about a premium, and more about offering a wider pool of buyers.”

Other buildings that Jamestown is retrofitting for environmental sustainability include 1250 Broadway, near 31st Street, and Chelsea Market, at 75 Ninth Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets in Manhattan.

By: Gina TrapaniMarch 1, 2010

Google Wave is an exciting new tool that combines the best features from email, instant messenger, forums, and wiki’s into a single interface. In Wave, a group of people can simultaneously edit the same document in their web browser in real-time. That means that you can watch your co-workers’ cursors type keystroke-by-keystroke on your screen as they work. Wave is flashy and full of potential—but what can you actually use it for?

Right now your organization’s documentation most likely lives in files saved on a shared network drive. Your co-workers copy and edit these documents, email them around as attachments, discuss them during meetings and over IM. Multiple versions proliferate; if one person is editing the file on the shared drive, another cannot because the file is locked. There’s no easy way to see who changed what, or figure out where the most recent version is located. Lengthy email threads fracture collaborative work the same way–with every reply, multiple copies proliferate, and it’s not always easy to see the most current state of the conversation.

Google Wave helps solve these problems. In Google Wave a document is a single, hosted conversation–called a lowercase “wave”–that participants can edit simultaneously in real-time. Participants can chat back and forth as well as co-edit the same text in a wave, and they can also search and playback changes to a wave over time.

Right now the Google Wave Preview is invitation-only, and it’s not close to finished. Still, there are three basic Wave use cases for your business.

First, Wave is a killer app for taking meeting notes. A dozen people taking notes in a single document is much more efficient than each person taking his or her individual notes. In Wave, you can add inline questions or comments that refer to individual points, creating an efficient backchannel: meeting attendees can respond to one another without interrupting the presenter, and latecomers can easily catch up on what they missed.

Second, Wave hosts in-depth conversations with remote co-workers who aren’t in the same conference room or office better than email or IM. You know those long emails with lists of bullet points and questions that get CC’ed to 20 people and garner dozens of fractured responses that clutter inboxes? Wave turns those kinds of discussions—the ones that require point-by-point replies—into a single hosted document that anyone can join in at any time.

Finally, Wave can serve as a light company intranet, where documentation can live and grow, and include rich content like maps, video clips, images, and polls. For example, a planning wave for the company picnic might use a poll to see who’s attending, include a list of food items participants can volunteer to bring, a map with directions to the park, and after the event, photos of the attendees everyone can comment on.

Whether or not Google Wave will get widely adopted remains to be seen. But whether it’s Wave or another web 2.0 application, real-time collaboration in a living workspace like Wave will replace those dead documents on your network’s shared drives eventually.

To request an invitation to Google Wave, visit wave.google.com. To learn more, check out my book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, which is free to read online at http://completewaveguide.com.

Not that long ago, having a virtual gave your online listing “wow” value. Today, virtual tours have become a routine—and even expected—element of property marketing. But that doesn’t mean your virtual tours have to be boring.

New advancements and add-ons are taking this tool to the next level, helping buyers get a better feel for the home and the neighborhood without having to leave their chairs.

The biggest virtual tour advancement over the past two years has been the growing popularity of video tours. Video is great for conveying the look and feel of a house, the flow from room to room, and the visual appeal of selling points.

Here are several other new tools, perhaps lesser known than video, that you can use to make your online tours more appealing and informative. Some of these are widely available, while others are exclusive features available only from certain vendors. In my opinion, all of them are underused—which means you have the chance, once again, to stand out from the crowd.

1. Show Off the Floor Plan. Other than actually walking around the home in person, interactive floor plans are the best way to give buyers a sense of how the home is laid out. Interactive floor plans typically display an illustrated map, and let users click on areas of the floor plan to see an image or video clip from that vantage point.

How you can add it: Many vendors offer this feature, including TourVista, Flyinside.com, VHT,  MapsAlive, and floorplansonline.

2. Help Them See Improvements. Don’t just ask them to “imagine” what new cabinets or flooring would look like. Show them. Prospective buyers can click on an image from the virtual tour and instantly change the wall colors, redo the countertops, add a new roof, and more. Then they can print out the results.

How you can add it: Obeo’s StyleDesigner is an upgrade to its HomeSite virtual tour packages. You can virtually decorate the space and then send the image to clients, or e-mail the image to clients so they can do the decorating themselves.

3. Make Marvelous Maps. Most buyers are just as interested in the community as they are in the property itself. Map mash-ups are an effective way to present that information visually. Your MLS likely provides a basic mash-up map populated with landmarks linked to listing photos and information. But you can combine maps with other types of information, too: schools, recreation facilities, shopping centers, restaurants, and even commute times. For example, REALTOR.com’s “Find A Neighborhood” feature combines housing and demographic information with maps consumers can use to explore what’s available.

How you can add it: For an idea of how mash-ups are being used in real estate, check Google’s Maps Mania directory for real estate. Sophisticated as any of these mash-ups may seem, if you can drag and drop, cut and paste, you can create one. It’s just as easy to incorporate it into your Web site or add it to your tour. To learn how, start with Google or Mapbuilder.

4. Use More Pictures, Better Pictures. If you’re looking for an easy enhancement, simply add more photos and using some tools to improve the presentation. A survey by Point2Technologies earlier this year found a direct correlation between the number of photos and the effectiveness of online tours. Also, consider adding photos of the view.

How you can add it: TourFactory’s ultimate tour package now gives you the option of viewing pictures in a standard or widescreen mode. JustSnooping.com offers a High Def Home Show package to showcase listings at the maximum image quality and resolution attainable on the Web. For exploring an area, Realtor.com’s HD City Views of select cities (see New York, for an example) demonstrate how far digital imaging has come in its ability to capture the details of a neighborhood in an inviting, interactive image. To improve photos taken of a city view, Imagemaker 360 has a unique feature to called VIEW Technology that restores clarity lost in backlit situations for a more realistic presentation of how the outside appears through the glass.

5. Go 3D. Microsoft has just announced its Photosynth stitching technology that takes two dimensional images and re-renders them in a navigable 3D image. They’re similar but not quite the same as IPIX immersive images. The big difference: you can create them from pictures taken with any digital camera and free software from Microsoft.

Do Your Listings a Favor

Everyone knows how important it is for buyers to be able to view homes on the Web. Yet, too few real estate professionals are rising to the task and offering top-notch virtual tours. Do your listings justice and impress your clients by investigating some of the extras I listed above. In a challenging market, the listings that are presented best on the Web are the ones that will get the most attention.

There is no question that blogging can be a powerful tool to help you and your Web site stand out from the crowd and generate new business. And, as many have already discovered, it can be time-consuming and a lot of work—until now.

Here’s an innovative way to post compelling content to your blog in just seconds that will also help propel your site to the top of the search engine results.

Photo Blogging: Cell Phone to Blog Post in 90 Seconds Flat

Photo blogging is a way to leverage what you do best every day—look at properties and use your cell phone—to create fresh search engine relevant content for your blog even several times a day. Here’s how it works:

1. Snap a picture of a listing in your market area with your cell phone.

2. Compose an e-mail with the address of the listing as the subject line and just a sentence or two describing the property.

3. Send the e-mail to a special address (which we’ll discuss in a second) at which, once it’s received, it will instantly post your subject line as the blog post title, insert the photo, and follow it up with the descriptive text as the main body of your post.

(Note: It probably goes without saying, but unless you have an agreement with the seller, do not present yourself as the listing agent when promoting these property photos.)

There you have it—about 90 seconds total (unless you’re all thumbs like me; then it might take you two minutes). And what is really cool is that you haven’t broken your daily routine to do it. And there’s no more staring at a blank computer screen trying to figure out what to post while you could be out looking at properties—because you’ll already be out looking at properties.

Now at this point you are probably thinking: “Awesome—I can do that! What’s that special address I need to send these e-mails to?” As you might have guessed, there’s just a little bit of set-up you have to do before you start photo blogging.

Getting Started

The first thing you want to do is set up a free account at Posterous.com. Once you’ve completed that, you’ll be able to send your cell-phone posts to post@posterous.com, and it will know who sent it (it also works with e-mail sent from any device, including your computer). Now if this is far as you go, Posterous will automatically create your blog and handle updating it via your e-mails. However, if you want to maximize the Google “juice” that a frequently updated blog can give you and have a look and feel that is consistent with your brand, there are a few other things that you’ll want to do:

1. Create a subdomain from your main Web site domain that points to your photo blog. For example, if your main site domain is LuxuryMountainHomes.com, then you may want to set your photo blog URL to photoblog.LuxuryMountainHomes.com with links to it on every page of your site. By doing this, search engines like Google will attribute the new photo blog content to your entire site. And since you used the property address as the post title, your site’s relevancy for your market area increases with every submission.

2. Have your Web designer modify the look and feel of your Posterous blog to be consistent with that of your main Web site.

By doing the above, you now have a way to constantly add high-relevance blog content to your site, day in and day out, without breaking a sweat.

NOTE: If you already have a blog with more traditional content, be sure to make your photo blog separate from it. Not everyone subscribed to your current blog will want to receive your photo blog posts throughout the day. Remember, the main benefit of a photo blog is quickly and easily adding search engine relevant content to your site on a regular basis, not necessarily to inform a reader base.

One Practitioner Found Success in Just a Few Months

Walter Burns is a condo specialist with Weichert, REALTORS®, in Hoboken, N.J. Thanks to his social media efforts—a large part of which is his photo blogging—his average transaction prices have soared from $250,000 to over $600,000 in a short period of time. You can see his photo blog by going to http://photos.livingonthehudson.com/. Notice that in addition to his photo blog, he has a traditional one as well, and both are seamlessly integrated into his main site, www.LivingOnTheHudson.com. If you examine both, you will see that the frequency of his posts to his photo blog is far greater than his regular one. And for good reason—it’s so darn easy!

Whether you’re brand new to blogging or a seasoned social networking pro, photo blogging is one tool you should be using on a daily basis. If you can take photos and text with your cell phone, you can photo blog.

But for those who require more concrete evidence of the contributions trees make, an innovative citizen-driven effort to map Austin-area trees can help you calculate how their presence affects a home or business site.

The Great Austin Tree Roundup, launched in 2009, provides an easy online tool that anyone and everyone is encouraged to utilize. Once inventoried, a specific tree can be evaluated, based on its species and size. The mapping site gives you a calculation of the impact on storm water runoff, electricity savings and other environmental and economic factors.

The Roundup is a joint effort between the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and TreeFolks, an Austin nonprofit dedicated to planting more trees and educating people about their value. It grew out of an awareness of the need to document Austin-area trees, says TreeFolks executive director Scott Harris.

“The overall value is getting people really thinking about trees as infrastructure with amazing benefits,” Harris says.

Some of those benefits include shading buildings to reduce energy consumption; capturing large quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to prevent it from being released into the atmosphere; and mitigating storm water runoff by filtering pollutants and slowing down the rush of water with their massive root systems.

“All of the stuff you know trees do, there is a calculator that attaches a dollar amount to them,” Harris says.

While not every tree in Austin will be counted, the mapping will provide biologists with a better idea of the cross section of tree species that exist here. For example, urban foresters have projected “a wave of deforestation in the next few years,” Harris said, due to mass plantings of the short-lived Arizona ash in new home developments. Tree mapping could help anticipate future urban forest needs and overall trends.

There are other benefits: Unabashed tree huggers now have a way to document mature trees that might fall victim to a construction project, Harris said. And the Tree Roundup organizers hope the citizen interaction model will encourage non-foresters to become involved as “citizen scientists, furthering knowledge of the diversity of species, structure, health and functions of trees in their communities,” according to promotional materials.

That’s already happening, Harris says. “People just flip out, everywhere we present this. There are some folks in the Barton Hills neighborhood who are mapping trees as fast or faster than we can get the trees up.”

And organizers have barely started enlisting help with the project. Scout troops, schools and a broad range of conservation-minded groups will eventually be enlisted to help collect data. Previous tree inventories done by the City of Austin, the Wildflower Center and the University of Texas account for nearly 20,000 of the 22,634 trees already mapped.

For more information about participating in the Roundup, go to www.treeroundup.org.

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The ACC Board of Trustees unanimously approved a contract late Thursday to purchase additional property for the college’s Rio Grande Campus in downtown Austin.

ACC will purchase three tracts of land adjacent to the campus, totaling about half an acre, for $2.1 million plus closing costs, which are available from 2009 revenue bonds.

The land is located at 1209 and 1215 Rio Grande St. and 605 13th St. Trustees authorized the college to negotiate for the purchase of land in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Campus in February 2007 to allow for future expansion.

ACC’s districtwide facilities master planning is currently underway. That process, scheduled to be completed this year, will recommend specific uses for the property.

Forgot that file on your work computer again? Leave an Excel spreadsheet you need for a presentation on your home laptop? Google on Tuesday introduced a service that will let you upload any type of file to Google Docs and access it from the cloud.

Google Apps users will soon be able to upload any file up to 250MB. The service will provide up to 1GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year. Google will start rolling out the service in the coming weeks.

“Now accessing your work files doesn’t require a connection to your internal office network,” Anil Sabharwal with the Google Docs team, wrote in a blog post. “Nor do you need to e-mail files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.”

Combined with the shared folders option on Google Docs, users can upload files and give permission for friends or co-workers to edit those documents.

“For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print,” Vijay Bangaru, product manager for Google Docs, wrote in a separate blog post.

Uploaded documents can be searched, and many common document files types can be viewed via Google Docs viewer.

Those with Google Apps Premier Edition can use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files in batch or purchase third-party apps that allow for migration and synching to Google Docs.

Those apps include: Memeo Connect for Google Apps, a desktop app for PCs and Macs; Syncplicity, which offers businesses automated back-up and file management with Google Docs for the PC; and Manymoon, an online project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs.

In the next few months, Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to buy additional storage for $3.50 per GB per year. Users can fill out an online form to be notified when this feature is available.

Rumors of a fabled Google GDrive have been floating around the Web since 2006, with the news cropping up again early last year. While this latest offering does not come with the GDrive moniker, it sounds very similar to a GDrive abstract published about a year ago: “GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents [accessible] anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.”

A Microsoft spokeswoman was quick to note that the company has been offering 25GB of cloud-based storage space for free via Windows Live SkyDrive since 2008. The company also promised more efficient collaboration with its forthcoming suite of Office Web apps hosted on SkyDrive, a feature that is currently in a limited beta.

Austin-area office vacancy rates and rents edged down in the fourth quarter from the previous year, new figures show, and 2010 is expected to look like a repeat of 2009, with no significant increases in overall occupancy, local experts said.

The vacancy rate for top-quality, or Class A, office space was 24.9 percent at the end of 2009, according to Oxford Commercial, which tracks the office market. The rate was unchanged from last year’s third quarter but remained at its highest level since the end of 2004, when the vacancy rate was 26.8 percent.

Rents for premium space averaged $27.64 a square foot per year in the fourth quarter of 2009, the lowest level since the end of 2006, when rents averaged $26.19 per square foot annually.

Office leasing is usually tied to job growth, and the Central Texas region lost 4,300 jobs during the 12 months that ended in November.

“The only way you’re going to lease up existing vacant office space is with job growth, so until we start having positive job growth, the market’s not going to have a lot of leasing activity,” said Karen Judson, vice president of marketing and research in Austin for Transwestern, a national commercial real estate firm. “All the experts keep talking about a jobless recovery. That’s bad news for office leasing.”

Downtown had the lowest Class A vacancy rate with 16.8 percent, compared with 12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.

But some suburban areas aren’t faring nearly as well: Round Rock’s vacancy rate for Class A space was 58.2 percent, and the rate was slightly more than 29 percent in far Northwest Austin, where some new complexes are empty or barely occupied.

Some of those landlords are offering free rent for as long as a year for tenants who sign long-term leases, said Ford Alexander, a partner with Oxford Commercial.

In general, “tenants are moving around and taking advantage of opportunities in the market,” Alexander said. “A few are growing, the majority are downsizing, and others are just staying put or staying the same size.”

Last year, many tenants downsized their office space or delayed decisions by signing short-term lease renewals, Alexander said.

But lately, he said, he’s been seeing a change: Businesses are “adjusting to the new economy” and signing longer-term leases, such as for five years instead of one or two years.

Judson said the hope is that experts who predict Austin will be one of the first markets to rebound are right.

“We’re all keeping our fingers crossed,” she said.

snovak@statesman.com; 445-3856

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