LEED: Older sites include challenges

DALLAS BUSINESS JOURNAL

LEED: Older Sites Include Challenges

Westmount Realty Capital LLC recently earned LEED silver certification for an existing office building at Riverside Commons Building No. 2 in Irving.

The certification was achieved for about 3% additional expense over the approximately $2.5 million already planned to remodel the 25-year-old, 66,000-square-foot building, said Steve Kanoff, Westmount’s executive vice president and partner.

“We busted a common myth that going ‘green’ and getting LEED certification is not economically feasible for existing buildings.” he said, “We’ve proved that is not the case.”

Westmount actually received the notice of LEED certification for the building after selling it, Kanoff said. In January 2009 an entity affiliated with Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, bought the entire 460,000-square-foot, six-building Riverside commons office campus in Las Colinas. RIM was a major tenant in the complex since February 2007, leasing about one-third of the office complex for its U.S. headquarters.

To help fill the remaining two-thirds of the building, Westmount moved forward on a renovation of Building No 2, and decided to explore the cost of LEED certification in the process, Kanoff said. Westmount decided to go for the certification after determining the additional cost would be minimal, he said.

One key challenge was that the Riverside building was constructed in the mid-1980’s with single-pane glass, Kanoff said. Testing with the single-pane glass led Westmount and its architect, Dallas-based Corgan Associates, to initially conclude that the only way to obtain the LEED-required energy savings would be to install a more expensive air-conditioning system.

But, after more study, Kanoff and the architecture team came up with the idea of using a window film that achieved the same effect of double-pane or thermal-pane glass, Kanoff said. The window film cost $60,000 but allowed Westmount to achieve the necessary energy savings with an approximately $300,000 air-cooled air-conditioning system instead of a $600,000-plus water-cooled system, he said. “Overall, the window film, new air-conditioning system and other upgrades will cut energy consumption by 30%,” Kanoff said.

Although some cash-strapped companies have temporarily put LEED certification on the backburner, because of the recession, that won’t last long, he said. “Once we’re out of the recession, even more companies will have a sustainable requirement for their office space,” he said. “This is a way to distinguish your building from the competition. It’s a way of doing well by doing good.”