PRE again judges NAREIT’s Sustainability Award

The Program in Real Estate, (PRE), will again participate as a judge in the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, (NAREIT), annual Leader in the Light Award, (LIL). The other three judges come from EPA’s Commercial Building Energy Star Program, the United States Green Building Council, (USGBC) and the management company, Real Foundations. The PRE has provided one of national judges each year since 2006.

The LIL award honors NAREIT member companies that demonstrate superior and sustained energy use practices and company-wide operations which generate substantially improved energy efficiency and expense management.

For the past four years the PRE judge has been Mark Vorreuter who is a PRE alumnus, LEED AP and the instructor in one of the PRE Sustainability Core courses called “Introduction to Green Real Estate”.

“This fall the Green RE class will again play an insider’s role in the LIL judging by reviewing the expected 20+ submissions and then conducting a round-robin process of presentations, discussion and voting. The class’s selections of first, second and third place will be compared to the actual negotiations and decisions made by the judging committee.” said Vorreuter. 

In 2009 the Green RE class’s top 6 selections included 5 of final LIL Award winners including the class’s 1st place selection of Thomas Properties Group which was also selected for 1st place in the actual judging.

According to Vorreuter, “The LIL submissions and judging always come at a great time in the semester since the students have at that point learned a lot about the EPA Energy Star benchmarking system, the various USGBC’s LEED rating systems and also about other programs offered by organizations such as BOMA. Many of the submissions tout their company’s participation in these programs and the students are able to understand and rank the levels of achievement across a very competitive field of submissions.”

The integration of the LIL judging into the “Introduction to Green Real Estate” class provides an excellent opportunity to see what the nation’s most sustainability oriented REITs are doing to save energy and improve their operations.  Kimberlee Swartz, PRE Coordinator of Career Services, will again work to make all NAREIT member companies and especially those that submitted aware that PRE students in the “Sustainable Development” track make excellent interns and full time hires. According to Swartz, “These students are familiar with LEED, Energy Star and the broad scope of activities that make-up what gets categorized as Green Real Estate. This is all in addition to the PRE MBA like toolkit for real estate”. 

For more information about the PRE concentration in sustainable development or to inquire about interviewing PRE interns or spring graduates contact Mark Vorreuter at mdv8@cornell.edu.