What are the best practices for FM budgeting to achieve LEED certification?

1 Assess your current situation

Before you start budgeting for LEED certification, you need to assess your current situation and identify your goals. You should conduct a baseline assessment of your building's energy, water, waste, and indoor environmental quality. This will help you determine your current performance and potential areas for improvement. You should also review your existing contracts, policies, and procedures to see if they align with your sustainability objectives. Finally, you should define your scope and level of LEED certification, based on your budget, timeline, and stakeholder expectations.

2 Estimate your costs and benefits

Once you have a clear picture of your current situation and your goals, you need to estimate your costs and benefits of pursuing LEED certification. You should consider both the initial and the recurring costs, such as design fees, construction materials, equipment upgrades, commissioning, certification fees, monitoring, and verification. You should also quantify the benefits, such as energy savings, water conservation, waste reduction, productivity gains, health improvements, and market value. You can use tools such as the LEED Project Cost Estimator and the LEED Value Calculator to help you with this process.

3 Prioritize your strategies

After estimating your costs and benefits, it's important to prioritize strategies to achieve LEED certification. Focus on those with the highest return on investment, lowest payback period, and most impact on performance. Additionally, consider the feasibility, availability, and compatibility of the strategies with your building type, location, and operations. To achieve LEED certification, you may want to improve lighting efficiency and controls, install renewable energy systems or purchase green power, implement water-efficient fixtures and landscaping, reduce waste generation and increase recycling rate, enhance indoor air quality and ventilation, or promote green transportation and education.

4 Allocate your resources

Once you have prioritized your strategies, you need to allocate your resources to implement them. You should create a detailed budget that outlines the sources and uses of funds for each strategy. You should also identify the roles and responsibilities of your team members and external partners, such as designers, contractors, consultants, and vendors. You should ensure that you have adequate contingency funds, risk management plans, and quality assurance measures to deal with any unforeseen challenges or changes.

5 Track and report your progress

As you implement your strategies, you need to track and report your progress to measure your performance and validate your results. You should use tools such as the LEED Online platform and the Arc performance platform to document your achievements and submit your application for LEED certification. You should also use meters, sensors, and software to monitor your energy, water, waste, and indoor environmental quality data. You should communicate your progress and outcomes to your stakeholders, such as owners, tenants, employees, and customers, to showcase your success and solicit feedback.