What it’s like to be a first mover: Blair Madden Bui on her green building commitment

This article was originally published in RMI’s Solutions Journal here

When asked, “Why are you pursuing net-zero energy,” Blair Madden Bui answered simply “Why not?”

This response is incredibly characteristic of the subtle tenacity and vision embodied by the chief executive officer of the John Madden Company—a pioneer of commercial real estate development in Colorado’s greater Denver area since the 1960s.

Today, the company’s goal is to maintain this same pioneer spirit by prioritizing sustainability. Since taking up her position in 2014, Madden Bui has set the John Madden Company’s entire building portfolio—consisting of close to 800,000 ft2 of space—on an ambitious pathway to net-zero energy (NZE). No other real estate portfolio of this size in the nation can claim that. But this “why not?” attitude that fundamentally shapes her thinking means that Madden Bui saw opportunity where others may only see risk or cost.

Building and Aligning Value

For the John Madden Company, energy performance is not a novelty or a tagline—it’s a necessity that’s core to its business strategy. With major corporate tenants including Charter, Fidelity, Newmont, and Global Medical Response, the company needs to meet the growing demands of savvy tenants who are seeking office locations that boost their employees’ health and productivity, build a sense of community, and say something about what their brands stand for. Sustainable office space delivers all those benefits.

“Tenants care about the workspaces they are creating for their employees,” said Madden Bui. “When Fidelity came to our campus, they required that we recommission buildings for LEED certification—to provide a space for their employees to thrive in. Companies care about sustainability because they care about their teams and see the effect on their bottom line.”

Building value for the future, not just the present, prompted Madden Bui to pursue a long-term NZE strategy for not just individual buildings, but the entire portfolio, setting her and her company on an exciting but somewhat unknown path to an entirely new echelon of industry leadership.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Spring

To turn promise into practice, Madden Bui sought the support of Rocky Mountain Institute (at the recommendation of RMI board member Tom Dinwoodie) in 2012 to lay the foundation for the company’s net-zero energy strategy. The partnership flourished from there, and has since resulted in a body of work that elegantly blends Madden Bui’s market influence with philanthropic support to leverage all aspects of RMI’s “think-do-scale” change model to make meaningful progress in reducing the carbon footprint of US commercial buildings.

“Putting all of our buildings on a pathway to zero is a bold goal and incredibly complex to achieve,” said Madden Bui. “It is a process over time that will ultimately yield great results, but requires the right steps in the right order. That’s why we’re working with RMI.” The importance of having a clear goal around the beginning of a project and aligning stakeholders around it was an early lesson. The John Madden Company team recalls a significant learning experience in a design charrette on a new project where a net-zero energy goal was considered, but the team quickly recognized that it was too late in the design process to achieve it successfully or cost-effectively. “We realized that we couldn’t tackle this overnight,” said Madden Bui. “Instead, we had to manage a paradigm shift in how we build and improve our portfolio over a longer period of time. It’s a process that won’t happen overnight. We expect our path to net-zero energy will take at least 20 years, but starting somewhere was important to our team and our tenants.”

A Path for Others to Follow

Today, movement is happening thanks, in large part, to the continued philanthropic and market partnership between the John Madden Company and RMI. One by one, the team is chipping away at the seemingly unsurmountable market barriers that have held developers back from pursuing NZE in their leased commercial projects. One of those barriers is the complexity of lease agreements needed to support a successful NZE project that has multiple tenants.

RMI and our partners successfully addressed that barrier during RMI’s move to Boulder Commons, a first-of its kind NZE mixed-use space in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks to Madden Bui’s support, the RMI team was able to capture and share a collection of best practices and recommendations in the recently published Best Practices for Leasing Net-Zero Energy Buildings to help other developers pursue NZE more quickly and efficiently. Another barrier is the perceived cost challenge associated with pursuing NZE. But Madden Bui and the team are debunking that myth as well. This past winter, the John Madden Company received $7.1 million in commercial property assessed clean energy (C-PACE) financing—the largest ever financed through Colorado’s C-PACE program—to fund a deep retrofit project of Denver’s Fiddler’s Green Center that will save 30 percent in annual energy and maintenance costs. Madden Bui points to this as an example of the way that going green can open up formerly unavailable sources of capital.

“The building sector is risk averse. Nobody wants to go first. So Madden Bui’s role as a trendsetter is particularly powerful,” said Cara Carmichael, a manager with RMI’s buildings program and long-time collaborator with the John Madden Company. “Her ability to motivate and champion her teams through a long process is invaluable, and generosity in sharing these learnings with the industry is rare.” To this, Madden Bui simply replies, “Well, the industry is ready. It’s time to move.”