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In my nearly 20 years working at the intersection of real estate and sustainability, I've seen a few market cycles, and a predictable change in sustainability terminology every few years as vocabulary falls in and out of favor. But the essence of the work has never changed. The science and engineering are the same. And no matter what we call it this year, the value of energy efficiency, onsite energy infrastructure, and of breaking down silos in highly fragmented organizations, has never been greater for real estate.
The pressures on the market are hard to ignore. Nominal U.S. electricity prices have risen 23% for all sectors since 20191, after two decades of flat demand2. More than 2,060 GW of projects are waiting in grid interconnection queues3. Sixteen U.S. cities, counties, and states now have active Building Energy Performance Standards covering 25% of the U.S. building stock4. And U.S. commercial property insurance premiums have climbed 88% over the last five years5. Together, these forces are poised to fundamentally change how real estate mitigates risk, builds value, and invests in its assets.
Introducing REsponsible Asset Solutions
Appropriately timed with Climate Week, Longevity Partners announced REsponsible Asset Solutions (RAS), our new partnership with Principal Asset Management. RAS brings together the institutional investment expertise of Principal Asset Management's dedicated real estate platform, a top-10 global real estate manager with $108 billion in assets under management and more than 65 years of experience, with Longevity Partners' engineering, procurement, and implementation capabilities. By combining deep real estate investment knowledge with technical decarbonization expertise, RAS delivers scalable, value-enhancing strategies that help clients advance their sustainability objectives while supporting long-term asset value.
The RAS model has been honed through real-world implementation across 14 institutional real estate assets, where we identified rooftop solar and demand-side energy initiatives that met investment return thresholds. Once fully implemented, these projects are projected to reduce energy consumption by 37% and generate more than $10 million in additional asset value at exit.
This work was designed to move past the roadblocks that have kept our industry stuck in data collection, reporting, and studies, and actually leverage that data to go straight to implementation at scale. We believe the RAS platform will become a model for profitable decarbonization in real estate, and will successfully address common roadblocks, including:
Speaking the wrong language. As an industry, sustainability advisors have too often spoken in kilowatt-hours and therms instead of NOI, cap rates, and value creation. I lived this on the consulting side and again inside a real estate organization. I've always worked with brilliant people, but we’ve too often missed opportunities to connect with our clients, and decision makers in the C-Suite, in the language they speak.
Working outside the business. Consultants, even excellent ones, sit outside the decisions that actually shape a building's future: acquisitions, capital planning, leasing, and hold/sell. I saw this firsthand when I moved to the owner's side. The sustainability leaders who get results embed themselves in those decisions, breaking down silos that have stood for decades. RAS is built the same way. We combine asset management and technical decarbonization expertise in one team, aligned around a single goal: profitable decarbonization.
Trying to boil the ocean. The traditional approach sets portfolio- or fund-wide targets across assets diversified by both asset class and market, often aiming to reduce GHG emissions or EUI by a set percentage across the board. That approach misses the real value creation opportunity: the focus needs to be on going deep on the right assets in the right markets and intentionally deprioritizing the others. With data analysis and insight that were unimaginable even a few years ago, we can prioritize the best value creation opportunities across vast portfolios in ways that still meet reduction targets, and that align with investor and owner return expectations.
Our partnership with Principal has moved past those silos and legacy approaches to build something rare: a venture aligned on value creation, speaking the same language, and combining Principal's deep asset management expertise with Longevity's end-to-end technical, financial, and commercial approach to drive action at scale. For me, this is not the culmination but the beginning. We're moving from collecting data and benchmarking to using those insights to find the right value creation opportunities and execute on them at scale.
The Competitive Building
The same day we announced RAS, Longevity hosted an executive panel titled "The Competitive Building: How Existing Assets Win Through Performance, Sustainability, & Resilience." GRESB's dynamic CIO Chris Pyke moderated a fantastic panel that included Giuls Kunkel (VP, Sustainable Investing, BGO), Gautami Palanki (VP, Sustainability, Vivmark Residential, the newly formed merger of equals between AvalonBay and Equity Residential), and Douglas Larson (Vice Chairman and EVP, Newmark Valuation & Advisory).
The conversation was interactive and optimistic, focused on value creation, risk mitigation, and new opportunities.
A few takeaways:
Sustainability has to pencil – and with the right strategies, it does. The winning strategies balance tenant and resident priorities with financial reality, delivering buildings that are healthy, comfortable, resilient, and efficient.
Buildings are energy assets, not just energy consumers. Solar and batteries are becoming revenue opportunities, and leading owners are already building portfolios and pipelines to capture them.
The office recovery is real in the right markets. Demand is strongest where tech companies cluster. Owners who retrofit for high performance and reposition sub-standard space will meet rising tenant expectations. Owners who don't will fall behind.
Thank you to our moderator Chris Pyke, and our panelists Giuliana Kunkel CEM, LEED AP, Gautami Palanki, and Douglas Larson, and to an audience that jumped right in. It was energizing to imagine together what's possible when we invest in the buildings we already have.
In my experience, a good Climate Week conversation leaves attendees with something to think about and something new to take back and implement. This event did that and more, and we were honored to host it.
There's a lot of doom and gloom out there, but my biggest takeaway from this year’s Climate Week is one of optimism rooted in action.
Sources:
1"Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector," based on Forms EIA-861 and EIA-861S. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/
2Resources for the Future, "What's Happening to Electricity Affordability? in Five Charts," Resources, August 21, 2025. https://www.resources.org/archives/whats-happening-to-electricity-affordability-in-five-charts/
3[Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and GridTracker, Queued Up: 2026 Edition, Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection As of the End of 2025. https://emp.lbl.gov/queues].
4"Institute for Market Transformation, as cited in JLL Research, Turning Obsolescence into Opportunity, September 2025, p. 8
5JLL, "How climate risks are impacting real estate insurance costs," March 24, 2025. https://www.jll.com/en-us/insights/how-climate-risks-are-impacting-real-estate-insurance-costs
