Atlanta FM Blog

If you were to peer into a crystal ball to try to predict the future of commercial leased space in the Metro Atlanta area, what would you see? Sustainable leasing efforts will present all kinds of opportunities and challenges in the months ahead. Are you prepared to make the necessary informed decisions with regard to your company’s real estate portfolio? Building tenants, and what goes on in tenant space, are critical to the ongoing management and continual improvement of any building and it is the FM’s responsibility to know how to:

1. Maintain a green building through operations and management practices.
2. Educate brokers and prospective tenants about what it means to occupy a high performance green building.
3. Communicate the responsibilities of all parties in the ongoing efforts to keep the building green.

Enforceable Tenant Responsibilities

Terms of the lease present incentives to tenants to reduce consumption of energy, water and materials, produce less waste, recycle as much as possible, and choose energy efficient and environmentally friendly products, furnishings and office equipment. The lease should includes enforceable language, where appropriate, to ensure that the tenant complies with the building’s green practices.

Pass Through Capital Costs

What kinds of alternatives to the typical triple net lease are there, where the landlord pays for capital improvements but the tenants, who pay the utility bills, reap the benefits of energy savings. The language included in a lease gives owners the right as standard procedure to pass through to tenants any capital costs that result in lower total operating costs. New green language ensures that maintaining, managing, reporting, commissioning and re-commissioning the building to conform to a green certification or rating program and is included in the pass through costs to the tenants.

Green Certification Annotation

A Green lease should be designed to be flexible to meet the needs of the specific building’s green building practices, and therefore is rating-system neutral. It does contain additional annotation provided by experts from the organizations involved in the three rating systems predominant in the United States at this time: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR® program; the Green Building Initiative’s (GBI) Green Globes™ system; and the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™. For those participating in any of these three programs how can you benefit from being in a tenant situation? Do you know?

These very questions will be the focus of the April 15th, 2009 Monthly Atlanta Chapter meeting where we will ‘Get Real About Real Estate’ with a Member Panel Discussion on the current conditions of the Atlanta market. To join in on what should prove to be a lively discussion, register here.

Recently I watched a TV show on Hulu, (yes, gotta love those on-demand internet TV-viewing options, lol!) called ‘Lie to ME.‘ The premise of the show was a group of researchers who assisted police investigations by reading and interpreting body language of suspects to determine if they were lying or truthful.

Interesting fact: “The average person tells three lies in ten minutes of conversation”

Aside from the entertainment value of the show with its cut-aways to notable mug shots of famous individuals striking classic gestures of emotions and ‘potential’ cover-ups, this technique can be useful in the leadership management field as well. Recall the envisioning statement of the 1980′s “believe and you shall become” type of stuff. One can study leaders in various organizations to learn some of their body language techniques for effective communications as a type of mentoring tool to help develop personal leadership skills.

The below – referenced article in the current edition of Business Week caught my eye and I thought since we cover leadership skills as one of the CFM core competencies it would be useful to you all.

Reading the Body Language of Leadership

Researchers at MIT are focusing the latest sensor technology on the physical traits of leadership

By Stephen Baker
March 23 and 30, 2009

Game Changing Ideas for Business

Humans instinctively transmit signals that date back to our primal roots. People use vocal tones and cadence to establish dominance or trust. Or they impose their will by showing up late to meetings or feigning lack of interest when others speak …

Read more of the article here.

For more on body language:

http://www.squidoo.com/readingbodylanguage

The Arthur M. Blank Family Office received LEED Gold Certification in 2004

It was still dark that morning and I wasn’t sure where I was heading… but the directions said to take a right onto Howell Mill Road and that The Arthur M. Blank Family Office was up the hill at the 3^rd driveway on the left. I turned into the driveway passing through magnificent stone gates to behold a shadowy silhouette of a stately French-styled Chateau reminiscent of something from the Loire Valley rather than an office building inside the Atlanta perimeter. “Wow”, was all I could think. I could vaguely pick out the figure of a man standing at the front of the drive by a neatly manicured flower bed and rolled down my window to find out where I should park. It turns out that he was the very hands-on facility manager, Jay Lanning, our host for the meeting. He was waiting there to personally direct us into the parking deck tucked-under the building. I pulled up next to Christy Jellets from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens getting out of her mini-van and we walked together into the lower level elevator lobby marveling at the indoor waterfall with mosaic-tiled background. The rest of the incredible finishes of this space where our IFMA FM Breakfast Networking Meeting was being held were equally impressive. We were guided into a salon off the main reception that could have doubled for a classic 14^th century morning room where we waited for the rest of the meeting attendees to arrive. Once everyone was assembled, Jay lead us on a guided tour of the highlights of the complex including a library, a conference room with a round Camelot-styled table, and a grand ballroom meeting space which will be the venue for the March Atlanta Chapter of IFMA monthly meeting. As we walked throughout the space, we learned about how sustainable design was interwoven into the amazing selection of materials and building systems including the green cleaning program – proving that building green can, indeed, be beautiful and cost effective.

For those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to attend one of the newest meeting formats that the Atlanta Chapter of IFMA is offering to FM professionals, this is the one venue that you don’t want to miss. Attendees network with other professional members to discuss topics ranging from sustainability to building operational protocols.

The next meeting is scheduled for March 24^th at Invesco from 7-8:30am and is limited to 20 professional members. We will tour another great space and share how Atlanta facility managers are implementing green building design.

To sign up for the next FM Networking Series:

http://www.ifmaatlanta.org/events-view.html?id=29

For more information on The Arthur M. Blank Family Office LEED Gold Certification:

http://www.blankfoundation.org/leed/index.html#features

Video of the building construction and features:

http://www.blankfoundation.org/leed/video.html