🏡 Focusing in on climate-conscious prop-tech

Investors are becoming more conscious of real estate's impact on the environment around us, so who is going to outpace the market and bring home the bacon?

Happy Friday!

For the newbies - we’re here to give you a rundown of everything in sustainable development happening around the world. We’re covering the latest trends, developments, technology, and legislation in the green real estate.

This week, we’re diving into some juicy material with sustainable prop-tech investment heating up… let’s dive in.

Today’s newsletter will take ~ 3.5 minutes

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Trends

Pricing in the cost of carbon in real estate

• It’s no secret the real estate industry is slow to adopt new things - just look at the way buildings have been constructed for the past hundred years. Now more than ever, investors are needing to reevaluate financials to incorporate the cost of the emissions of their investments. If you look at the ESG craze that has happened over the past several years, it’s evident that investors, both at the retail and institutional levels, are revising their standards for investment. However, this trend has yet to make it into real estate which is concerning given the amount of net-zero real estate goals cities and countries have put in place.

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Deals & Developments

VC firm Fifth Wall closes $500m Climate Fund

• Fifth Wall founder Brendan Wallace has always had a passion for sustainability and now, his prop-tech focused VC firm will take its first official step towards decarbonizing the real estate industry with the new fund. Sub themes for the fund include sustainable property software & hardware, smart building technologies, and carbon sequestration tech. Notable LP commitments include CBRE, Hilton, MGM Resorts, Hudson Pacific Properties, and Camden Property Trust.

• Fun fact… according to Brendan, the cost to effectively decarbonize the commercial real estate industry in the US is approximately $18 trillion USD. I guess we should tell BlackRock to spend the next 6 years allocating their annualized $3T loss towards climate tech instead.

Bringing adaptive reuse to a warehouse in Austin

• After being delayed for two years, Gensler’s Fifth and Tillery is taking the adaptive reuse concept to new levels to create a 180,000 SF social campus for artists and offices. The outdoor corridors minimize conditioned space while keeping original structures in-tact to minimize the addition of further embodied carbon. Additionally, the project incorporates over 600 kW of solar panels to offset its energy dependence on the grid.

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Technology

Upward Labs selects 6 companies for its Net Zero Lab

• The Net Zero Lab is an incubator in New York looking to generate innovative solutions to large challenges within the real estate industry. Notable inductees to the incubator include Inovues, a retrofitting system for building facades to increase efficiencies, SolarGaps, an automation system to optimize solar panel efficiency, and EnKoat, a building envelop thermal storage technology.

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Legislation

Las Vegas is capping the size of residential swimming pools

• Citing concerns regarding allocations of the Colorado River, the primary freshwater source for more than 40 million Americans, Clark County officials voted to limit the size of new swimming pools to 600 square feet. If you’ve driven by Lake Mead or Lake Powell in recent months, you already know how dire the situation is. Clark County is one of the capitals of swimming pool density in the US with nearly one private swimming pool per 10 residents. Considering an eye-popping 23,000 gallons of water evaporate per year for the average sized Vegas swimming pool, the 200,000+ swimming pools are responsible for the direct loss of 4.6 billion gallons of water, the equivalent of 27 Rose Bowls full of water.

DC got one step closer to a net-zero requirement for buildings

• This week, the DC Council approved Bill 24-420 which would require all new buildings to achieve the net-zero energy standard by 2026.

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Quick Takes

Teens are going all new-urbanist on Tik-Tok…

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Fact for Thought

Blackstone’s new real estate fund will close with over $30 billion USD AUM… once closed, the fund will be the largest ever of it’s kind by over $6 billion.

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Let us know what you like!