One interesting legal question that could arise in the green lease context is exactly how a court would construe aspirational clauses in the event the parties dispute exactly how “aspirational” those clauses should be.
Tag Archives | environmental performance objective clauses
Giveaway: USGBC’s Green Office Guide for Integrating LEED Into Your Leasing Process*
USGBC’s Green Lease Guide does much more than just discuss the split incentive that’s a major barrier to implementing a truly green lease; it provides tenants with a form environmental impact questionnaire designed to assist them in vetting potential properties, as well as eleven pages of sample green lease provisions. The Guide is primarily written for commercial office tenants, but landlords will find its background information useful as well.
Model Green Lease Lands in New York City at Urban Green Expo
Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to join a panel discussion on green leasing at the Urban Green Expo here in New York City. The session, which was titled “Green Leases: Aligning the Incentives of Landlord and Tenant,” presented the results of four projects which aim to provide brokers, landlords, tenants, and their attorneys with guidance towards creating more sustainable leasing structures. The projects, which may be familiar to you, were the Real Property Association of Canada’s (REALpac) Green Office Lease, the BOMA Green Lease Guide, and the NRDC’s Green Lease Forum, which aimed to create a set of principles for lease negotiations and other recommendations for making existing leases more energy efficient. I presented the Model Green Lease Task Force’s Model Green Lease- an effort which, as you may know, was spearheaded by green leasing guru Alan Whitson (who has contributed here at GRELJ previously in an insightful response to an article that we wrote on environmental performance objective clauses). Unlike the BOMA Green Lease Guide (created by Jones Day partner Steve Teitelbaum, who also participated on the panel), the Model Green Lease is an extremely compact document, drafted from scratch, which is fundamentally based on the theory that, in order to make a more compelling business case for green buildings, leases must be crafted as gross (i.e., the landlord is responsible for building operating expenses, unlike in a net lease, where the tenant pays for its own share of those costs). The document, which also includes a corresponding reference guide, comprises just 17 pages plus exhibits and incorporates ten essential elements that aim to support a specific definition of a green building created by the Task Force for purposes of the project: “[a] building that is environmentally responsible, profitable and a healthy place to live or work.”
