Sustainable certifications are a guide of good practices for promoting companies and a way to differentiate the property within the real estate market. However, there are doubts about how the certification requirements will affect the project, which should be clarified.
Economic overrun of the project
The voluntary sustainability certifications add value to the building by representing the developers' commitment to the environment, basing the development of their buildings on sustainability criteria and high energy efficiency.
Even so, the cost overrun impacting the project budget is real. The higher the goal regarding the rating within the certification, the more money will need to be invested in the introduction of sustainability measures. Thus, certification levels such as BREEAM Excellent or LEED Gold involve a high investment.
The entry of certification from preliminary project phases is key to reducing the economic impact on the project, as it allows for the assessment of implementing sustainability measures, which, if carried out at later stages, are not viable or are costly to implement.
Supporting documentation
The evidence is necessary to justify the different measures that have been carried out in the building before the certifier, therefore there is documentation to be generated by different responsible parties. Certification bodies such as BREEAM are in charge of disseminating them.
The designers and engineers are the ones who take on the bulk of the work, as the plans and project report are where many of the measures implemented in the project must be indicated.
For this purpose, a comprehensive document list of all credits for the sustainability certification must be compiled, in this way, the work for each party can be assessed from the outset and the status of the certification can be quickly monitored.
Impact on the work
The impact of the certification on the construction site may be one of the most contentious points, as the builder often sees the introduction of the different measures as a problem, which in practice, with the help of easy-to-implement procedures, is not so much of a problem.
Within the certifications, there are several points that correspond to aspects of the project, such as monitoring energy and water consumption, tracking waste, or implementing sustainable building practices.
In order to simplify all these points, a descriptive and simplified procedure of all the actions to be carried out can be drawn up, as well as the creation of an online platform where it is possible to enter the photographs justifying the sustainable practices, as well as the annotation of the consumption and waste data.
Certification deadlines
The timelines for achieving certification are a major concern for the promoters. On the part of the organizations and certifying entities, the evaluation time from the submission of the documentation, the reviews, and the obtaining of the certification is very clear and specified.
The main problem lies in the planning by the different parties responsible for delivering the supporting evidence to the consultants, as the work involved is often not sufficiently valued and not enough time is dedicated to the certification until the final stages of obtaining the certification.
For this reason, it is very important to integrate a project manager profile into the certification process to supervise that the tasks assigned to the different responsible parties are carried out and delivered within the established timeframes.
The person in charge of following the deadlines can be the consultant himself, or a member of the design team can be designated. But it is essential to do it from the beginning to carry out the certification process correctly and effectively.
Consulting with extensive experience, key to success
The described inconveniences are only the most common problems that arise in the implementation of sustainable certifications, and that we have been detecting through the evaluation of different types of buildings and different types of companies.
The role of the consultant is to know how to professionally manage all the issues that arise, applying criteria with the experience gained, allowing the goals set to be successfully reached, without causing a headache.
