ESEPA Honors CoStar Group
The award recognizes CoStar's outstanding contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through significant consumer education efforts aimed at increasing awareness of ENERGY STAR buildings and workspaces within the commercial real estate marketplace. CoStar will be recognized at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 2009.
CoStar, which became an ENERGY STAR partner last year, is being honored for its work in communicating the value of ENERGY STAR labeling to commercial property stakeholders through a landmark study sponsored in partnership with the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego. The CoStar study is believed to be the first to document the additional value that ENERGY STAR-labeled buildings attract in the market, generally outperforming their non-labeled peer buildings in several key categories, including higher rents, occupancy levels and sale prices.
To promote the study's findings, which found similar results for LEED-certified buildings, CoStar executives made numerous presentations at conferences around the nation hosted by real estate associations, brokerage firms and government agencies. Interest in the study remains high nearly a full year after the first formal report on the study was released.
"CoStar first began flagging ENERGY STAR-labeled buildings in our commercial property database in 2007 as an initial step to heighten awareness about the connection between asset values and energy efficiency within our industry, providing industry professionals with a fast and convenient means for identifying ENERGY STAR buildings in their markets and across the country," noted CoStar Group president and chief executive officer Andrew Florance.
As part of ongoing efforts to increase awareness of energy efficiency issues in the built environment, CoStar has co-sponsored The Journal of Sustainable Real Estate (JOSRE) with the goal of publishing a new collection of research papers addressing sustainable real estate issues, including ENERGY STAR. Information on JOSRE, as well as CoStar's study, is available on CoStar's web site at http://www.costar.com/josre/.
The Excellence in ENERGY STAR Promotion Award is given to a variety of organizations to recognize their efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce pollution, resulting in significant cost savings. Award winners are selected from more than 12,000 organizations that participate in the ENERGY STAR program.
Last year, Americans saved $19 billion on their energy bills and reduced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 29 million vehicles, according to the EPA.
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