Sustainability Street: CRE’s Retrofit Challenge

Chris Gray

Most properties built today use as little energy and as much renewable energy as possible. But there is a huge inventory of existing properties that must be retrofitted in order to improve their energy efficiency and reduce their carbon emissions.

Without a significant retrofit push in the commercial real estate space, the U.S. will not reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Meanwhile, a large swath of underperforming buildings may no longer be acceptable to sustainability-minded investors and tenants.

Welcome back to Sustainability Street, our podcast on the intersection of commercial real estate and the world we live in. For this episode, host CPE Executive Editor Therese Fitzgerald chats with Chris Gray, chief technology officer of RENU Communities, a subsidiary of Taurus Investments, about the importance of and strategies for retrofitting existing buildings. 

Here’s a sample of the topics covered:

• Why energy retrofits matter so much (1:20)
• Brown discount vs. green premium (2:25)
• The key retrofit strategies (5:14)
• Retrofits and renewable energy (8:34)
• What retrofits mean for the housing market (10:11)
• The case for retrofits in today’s current office market (21:35)
• Retrofits and the Inflation Reduction Act (23:54)