Green is good

9 Jul, 2012, Prague

Occupiers have become increasingly more specific in their requirements for ‘green’ premises.

One third of all office buildings developed in the years 2010-2014 either own or aspire to receive a ‘green’ certificate. This year, 11 office buildings are expected to be completed and five of them have ambitions of obtaining a ‘green’ certificate. Next year, the share of certified projects should be even higher and the ‘green’ certificate has become a common standard for developers in practice. All office premises currently under development, which are supposed to be completed in the years 2013-2014, either possess or are on their way to getting a ‘green’ pre-certificate.

Specific ‘green’ requirements submitted by occupiers from multinational corporations influence new developments as early as in the design stage. They consider certification as representing a certain guarantee of low energy consumption in the building.

“Often the term of ‘green’ building is misused for the term ‘energy saving building’. While an energy saving building focuses primarily on the consumption of the utilities, ‘green’ certificates have a substantially broader impact – they take into account the overall load imposed by the development and operation of buildings onto the environment. Besides the energy load, they also assess such criteria as the possibility of storing bicycles in the building or its accessibility by public municipal transport”, says Mr Ondřej Fukal, Head, Property Management team, Cushman & Wakefield Czech Republic and Slovakia.

“Successful certification in itself may not represent a guarantee of a really environmental friendly operation of the relevant building. Any applied modern ‘green’ technologies can doubtless create the correct preconditions for achieving such a goal. Nevertheless, they can easily prove useless if they are wrongly operated by the facility management. And it is not necessary to even mention the extreme cases of heating the premises in a hot summer or of the festive lighting of the facade of the building on a clear day”, Mr Fukal adds.

The telephone operator Vodafone has demonstrated a radical way of selecting its new headquarters under Czech conditions. While the majority of companies apply their own ideas as regards the interiors for their future offices, Vodafone asked the company FINEP to produce a “turn-key” design of the entire building made according to its own pre-defined technical standards.

“It was very far-sighted from Vodafone to have commenced the selection process four years in advance. Thanks to that, it was able to fulfil its requirements and did not have to make compromises for either the environmental friendly nature of the building, identical qualities of the working environment for all employees or the financial conditions”, says Ms Radka Novak, Head, Office Agency team, Cushman & Wakefield.

“We expected the rent for the new headquarters to be higher than the existing building due to the high technical standards. Nevertheless, a significantly lower consumption of utilities and higher efficiency of the premises have not only made up for this difference but they have even resulted in some savings in the total costs for the future period of lease”, says Mr Radka Novak.

Cushman & Wakefield was assigned the task of identifying the new headquarters for Vodafone. The set of services rendered also included consultations about the technical standards of the building and an analysis of sustainability of planned fees for services and consumption of the utilities. Vodafone is aware of the fact that getting the ‘green’ certificate was not a one-off matter. In order to keep it, the facility management must respond to changes in the occupation or in the regime of operation of the building by its occupiers so that the criteria applicable to obtaining such a ‘green’ certificate are complied with in the long term. The certification committee regularly monitors the observance of this.

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