31 Jul 2024
The Sydney Opera House’s concert hall glowed in a green light as a crush of sustainability champions gathered to celebrate the start of a new era. The occasion? The launch of launch Green Star Performance v1.
The year was 2013 and we couldn’t have picked a better building to showcase the power of Green Star Performance. Even a heritage-listed, one-of-a-kind national treasure like the Sydney Opera House could be assessed across nine holistic benchmarks so its management team could pinpoint areas to drive performance improvements over time.
And that’s exactly what Sydney Opera House’s team did. An initial 4 Star Green Star Performance rating would guide an ambitious sustainability agenda which ultimately culminated in a ‘world leadership’ 6 Star Green Star rating in 2023.
“This is proof that any building – old or new, big or small – can reach the highest sustainability outcomes,” said the Green Building Council of Australia’s Chief Executive Officer Davina Rooney when announcing the 6 Star achievement.
The Sydney Opera House is just one of 3,345 ratings the GBCA has issued since 2013. It’s never about raw numbers – although there is a story behind every single one of those 3,345 ratings. The true achievement is how the industry came together to develop a rating tool that would galvanise leadership and bring new sectors to the sustainability table.
Green Star Performance was many years in the making. In 2013, the original Green Star rating tool for office design was already a decade old, but there was no comprehensive measure available for owners of existing buildings to compare their assets’ performance.
The GBCA’s Jamie Wallis, who led the development of Green Star Performance v2, recalls the significance of the 2013 launch. Jamie spent nearly eight years working with Sustainability Victoria and led the delivery of The Next Wave Report – Retrofitting Victoria’s Office Buildings, which was also released in 2013.
“We knew lower grade buildings represented 80% of the City of Melbourne's office market and we needed tools to help owners start the journey to improvement. I remember telling my colleagues that Green Star Performance would be a ‘gamechanger’. And it was.”
New rating tools take time to gather momentum, and more than a year passed before the first rating was issued, with GPT bagging a 4 Star rating for Melbourne’s 800 Bourke Street in October 2014. The office was fully tenanted by National Australia Bank, and both tenant and landlord heralded Green Star Performance as a platform for greater collaboration. Other landlords took note.
“You can gain a 5 Star Green Star rating with an ageing building if you use the right methods and programs,” Wollongong’s Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery AM told his peers after Wollongong City Council achieved the first 5 Star rating for its 13-storey Administration Building in February 2015. The Lord Mayor emphasised the rating’s usefulness to demonstrate efficiency and low environmental impact and as a tool to “provide an enjoyable and healthy workplace for our staff.”
A few months later, Frasers Property, then known as Australand and Green Star Performance’s principal sponsor, secured the first portfolio rating for 54 commercial and industrial properties. Australand could then lay claim to the largest portfolio of Green Star certified space in the country – 1.3 million sqm in total. Then National Sustainability Manager Paolo Bevilacqua sent a strong message to the market: Green Star Performance offered a “holistic sustainability benchmark of the performance of our portfolio… something we have not had until now”.
“In the industrial sector this is particularly valuable, given the lack of any similar performance-based tools,” Paolo told The Fifth Estate at the time. “With a performance benchmark for 42 industrial properties we are now able to better inform our customers on how their property is performing against similar properties, the opportunities for improvement and the implications to their business in terms of reduced operating costs and a better performing workspace.”
The market began to understand Green Star Performance’s superpower.
Within 18 months, more than 700 Green Star Performance ratings had been certified or registered – nearly half of those for retail premises – and the industry’s leaders were in a “fierce competition”, The Fifth Estate said. Dexus, Stockland, Mirvac and ISPT had all embraced Green Star Performance as a “conversation starter” with tenants across their portfolios.
“The true success story of Green Star Performance is its take-up in so many sectors – in industrial, retail, retirement living, as well as office,” Jamie reflects. “Asset owners of any building type could pick up Green Star Performance and use it.”
Some of the industry’s sustainability leaders today used Green Star as a ladder to better. Vicinity Centres sought portfolio certification of 91 assets in June 2015, shortly after it was formed from the merger between Federation Centres and Novion Property Group. The portfolio received a 2 Star rating and the group made a public commitment to hit 3 Stars within a year. By 2019, Vicinity Centres had the highest rated retail portfolio in the country, with a 4 Star average.
Property NSW was the first government agency to attain the 5 Star Green Star Performance tick of approval in 2021, demonstrating that buildings from Bathurst to Broken Hill, Gunnedah to Grafton could be meet and beat energy efficiency targets.
Charter Hall brought a new level of scale when it registered 179 buildings in 2017. Today it holds the largest 5 Star rated portfolio of offices in the country, with 1.58 million sqm of space, as well as the most 6 Star rated assets. Charter Hall’s team saw Green Star Performance’s potential to demonstrate to investors that its sustainability strategy had driven down energy intensity by 20%, despite a 47% increase in floor area.
Perhaps the biggest impact Green Star Performance had on Australia’s property industry was in bringing new people to the sustainability table. Facility managers engaged deeply during the rating tool’s development and embraced it with enthusiasm. Owners with large portfolios of existing assets valued the third-party verification that lent authenticity to their sustainability strategies. Marketers gained a defence against greenwash claims. Leaders from across a broader range of sectors began to champion their ratings in conversations and on conference panels.
“Green Star Performance was visionary for its time, but the world has changed enormously in the last decade. Investors are looking for assets on a path to net zero. The sustainable finance community needs to know whether assets are aligned with global decarbonisation goals,” Jamie says.
The launch of Green Star Performance v2 in July 2024 brings the rating tool’s benchmarks into line with the world’s leading investor and sustainable finance frameworks and with the net zero expectations in the Climate Positive Pathway for Existing Buildings.
“Today, a third of Australia’s CBD office space has been certified with Green Star Performance. With the launch of Version 2, industrial buildings will become the single largest sector rated virtually overnight. It’s a staggering shift that will transform Australia’s built environment and help us deliver sustainability at scale,” Jamie concludes.
Green Star Performance v2 registrations are now open. All new projects must use v2 from 1 January 2025. Find out more here.