You won’t find it in the credit requirements, but the best strategy here is to limit the amount of hardscape and number of parking spaces provided in the first place. This not only reduces the hardscape square footage you must treat with light-colored paving, shading, open-grid paving, or covering, it can also help you earn:

SSc4.4 Alternative Transportation: Parking Capacity,

SSc5.2: Site Development—Maximize Open Space,
and SSc6.1 and SSc6.2: Stormwater Management

Define your project’s LEED boundary, and ensure that it is consistent across all credits pursued by your project. The LEED boundary defines the scope of work, and must include any land that will be disturbed and or used by your project.

Examine existing conditions to help guide site plan development. Does your existing site have shading from trees, covered parking, or light-colored hardscape? Are there ways to minimize your project site’s hardscape and parking areas (including gravel, which is considered hardscape)?   

If you need to modify existing hardscapes to meet the prescriptive goals of the credit, you can face added costs. For example, demo of a black asphalt parking lot to install a material with a lighter SRI would be an added expense compared with resurfacing the same asphalt. When dealing with existing hardscapes, it may be more cost-effective to shade areas with trees and architectural canopies than to replace the hardscapes with lighter SRI material.

This credit is fairly straightforward to achieve: You may comply by applying prescriptive design measures outlined by LEED to 50% of your project site’s hardscape or by covering 50% of your project's parking spaces. 

Conduct your cleaning audit early enough in the LEED project timeline so that if you score lower than expected, you can work with your provider to improve cleanliness levels and then re-audit. If your appearance level is between 2.1 and 3, you’ll earn one point. If you score a 2 or less, you can earn an additional point for exemplary performance.

Average the overall scores of the auditors to come up with a final score for the entire building. The sample size of audited space is in proportion to a space type’s prominence in the building, therefore no further normalizing based on square footage is necessary.

The audit is meant to help you improve your cleaning program. If you instruct your auditors to give each space a good score, you will not benefit from the honest results that will help you improve the cleanliness of the building. 

APPA estimates that no more than 10 minutes are required to assess any given room. 

The audit should not be announced to custodial staff or contractors. This will limit changes in standard practices in anticipation of the evaluation.