Houston Fifth Greenest Office Market
Houston's still one of the greenest office markets in the US, according to CBRE and Maastricht University's newly released 2015 Green Building Adoption Index, but we have dropped a rank. In 2014, Houston was fourth in the country with 55% of our office product Energy Star or LEED certified. This year, we've slid to fifth, with 53% of offices certified. The report finds that green certification is primarily a big city, big building phenomenon—only 4.5% of all buildings less than 100k SF qualify as green, compared to 62% of buildings over 500k SF. But even those larger cities and properties are slipping a little in their growth of green initiatives; Houston isn't the only market whose percentage dropped, and the report found that some buildings certified in 2014 didn't re-up. That's probably an indication that owners didn't spend the time and money to get recertified, not that the buildings became less sustainable.
