Best Practices

Use the tenant guidelines for marketing purposes. Many tenants that are already planning on achieving LEED-CI certification will seek out LEED-CS buildings that aid in their achievement of LEED. Providing these tenants with a list of the LEED-CS credits attempted and guidelines may help attract them to your building. 

During the leasing process, provide each tenant with the guidelines. They will need the guidelines before beginning their fit-outs.

If you plan to use the tenant guidelines for marketing purposes, make them a priority early in the process. 

Start the process early and make sure that everyone on the team understands roles and requirements, as it can be difficult to get the design team to provide specific information, and many owners are reluctant to review the guidelines. 

Providing tenants with cut sheets for your paint selections and other products will help them both understand the environmental benefits of your building, and help them select similar items for their own spaces.  

Consider including a section in your tenant guidelines that discusses sustainable operations and maintenance, and encourages the entire building to pursue LEED-EBOM. This is more likely for single-tenant buildings. 

Providing tenants with submetering capability and making them responsible for their own energy use can help to lower the building’s energy consumption as well as assist tenants in earning LEED-CI certification. Doing so also, contributes to earning EAc5.2 for your LEED-CS certification. 

You may find that, in order to attain LEED-CS certification, you must require tenants to meet certain performance or prescriptive requirements, such as energy and ventilation requirements, installation of walk-off mats, or refrigerant charge specifications. You might want to include the required measures in the tenant guidelines and the lease agreement, along with suggested recommendations. Doing this is not required for complying with SSc9, but may be necessary for other credits where the requirements cannot be fulfilled with the core-and-shell project alone.

The designated staff person should review all vendor practices and products prior to contract renewal (or annually) to identify opportunities for improvement and expansion of environmentally friendly practices.

Decide early which parties are responsible for creating the tenant guidelines, and include this task in contractual language describing the scope of their services.