Image credit: Port Authority of NY & NJ via AECOM.

Back on May 10, Tishman Construction placed the final piece of 1 World Trade Center’s spire in place, finally topping out the tallest tower in the Western Hemisphere at its symbolic 1776-foot height. Now the major hurdle that’s left for the Port Authority (and its minority partner, the Durst Organization) is to finish finding tenants for the rest of the 3.5 million-square-foot, 104-story tower, which today remains only 55-percent leased just 18 months before it’s slated for occupancy. But industry experts are confident that the tower’s symbolic stature and advanced building technologies will be more than enough to attract tenants to the world’s third-tallest building, particularly as the remainder of the World Trade Center site, including the Fulton Street transit connection – are completed.

To date only a handful of tenants have signed up for space at 1 WTC. The GSA, Conde-Nast (1 million square feet, anchor tenant) and the Chinese real estate investment firm Beijing Vantone (200,000 square feet) all completed deals since 2009. But despite sluggish leasing progress thus far in 2013, and even with asking rents around $70 per square foot, technology, media, financial, and legal industry tenants have all expressed interest in the tower, demonstrating its flexibility for and attraction to tenants from a diverse range of industries.

Indeed, as a spokesperson recently told AMNY “[our] philosophy is if you build a beautiful great building in New York, tenants will come.” And as AMNY also notes, 7 World Trade Center (the first LEED Gold-certified office building in the country) was a similarly speculative tower (i.e. no anchor tenant before construction commenced) and has acheived a great deal of leasing success, with occupancy rates consistently above 90 percent. As we noted earlier this year here at gbNYC+, 1 WTC’s marketing efforts have heated up in 2013, aimed particularly at attracting foreign companies to the tower. So while occupancy at 1 WTC may be right around the corner, don’t bet on 45 percent of the tower remaining vacant when the first tenants move in.

Again, the SOM-designed 1 World Trade Center is on track for a LEED Gold rating from USGBC – it would become one of the largest buildings anywhere to earn that designation. As we’ve also described here previously, 1 World Trade Center has a target energy use 20 percent below code, advanced indoor air filtration systems, daylight control systems, and waste steam recycling, among other advanced building technologies.

Entrance to 498 Seventh Avenue

The sustainability consulting firm CodeGreen Solutions recently announced that two George Comfort & Sons-owned office buildings in Midtown have earned LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (2009) certification from USGBC. The 650,000-square-foot 498 Seventh Avenue and the 900,000-square-foot 200 Madison Avenue were certified Gold and Silver, respectively. By our count, this raises the total number of LEED-EB-rated office buildings in New York City to 44.

200 Madison Avenue

Energy efficiency was a primary focus for CodeGreen in spearheading each tower’s certification efforts. Indeed, both earned Energy Star labels in 2012, and CodeGreen also performed ASHRAE Level 2 Energy Audits and retro-commissioning studies in connection with the certifications. Each building also dropped water consumption by 15 percent over LEED requirements, purchased 62.5 percent green power, and kept an ongoing consumables recycling rate of 50 percent during the -EB: OM performance period. Both properties should now be available in CodeGreen’s neat mobile app, which we noted here at gbNYC+ earlier this year.

The 25-story 498 Seventh Avenue is located between West 35th and 36th Streets and dates from 1920. It was originally designed by Harmin Jablin Architects in a neoclassical style and was once known as the Bates World Building. Current tenants include Mindshare, Modell’s, Liquidnet, and Jones Apparel.

Across town, 200 Madison Avenue’s tenant roster includes Greater New York Mutual Insurance and Rose Associates. That 25-story tower was designed by Warren & Wetmore (Grand Central Station) and has a colorful history, trading hands through the years from the Astor Estate to Marshall Field’s.

Recently, LinkedIn continued its impressive expansion run at the Empire State Building by signing on for the entire 22nd floor – an additional 31,000 square feet – bringing its total footprint at the iconic tower to nearly 110,000 square feet. The company’s increasing presence in the building continues to make it an attractive option for other technology and media sector tenants who are looking for space in the Midtown South submarket.

Initially in 2011, it was the tower’s green features and capital improvement program that were “key” to attracting LinkedIn’s initial 25,000-square-foot lease for the tower’s entire 25th floor. But the professional networking site has been so pleased with its experience at the world’s most famous office building that it’s been expanding ever since. “The building has worked for them better than anyone could have imagined,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Lois Weiss, who reported the deal in the Post last month. “Their cards don’t say ‘350 Fifth,’ they say ‘Empire State Building.’”

The Empire State Building is now completely leased up to its 25th floor: joining LinkedIn are Li & Fung USA, the FDIC, Coty, the World Monuments Fund, and Shutterstock. Asking rents above 25 are in the mid-$50s per square foot, with a full block of floors from 55 to 58 becoming available this summer.

LinkedIn’s expansion came just before New York County Supreme Court Justice Peter Sherwood approved Malkin Holdings’ controversial plan to covert ownership in the Empire State Building into a publicly traded REIT, which we’ve noted here at gbNYC+ previously in the context of the deal’s implications for advanced building technologies generally.

The 2.9-million-square-foot Empire State Building, of course, is both LEED Gold-certified under Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance and Energy Star-rated; its retrofit program also included refurbishing all 6500 of its windows and modernizing all 68 elevators (making them 30-percent more efficient and able to send excess energy back into the building’s electrical grid).

The online media company BuzzFeed has secured a two-year sublease from Tiffany for nearly 58,000 square feet on the full eighth floor of L&L Holdings’ historic LEED for Core and Shell Gold 200 Fifth Avenue. The company – which is currently heaquartered around the corner at 54 West 21st Street – is nearly doubling its footprint in connection with the move. Tiffany will build out the space itself – meaning that BuzzFeed will likely be on the move again when the sublease expires in the fall of 2015.

The deal reflects a couple of important points about the technology sector and the Midtown South submarket generally, as Lois Weiss notes in her piece in the Post that reported the transaction. First, locking into long-term leases is difficult for technology companies, whose space requirements are volatile: BuzzFeed started out with just 3500 square feet at 113 Spring Street. Second, although the supply of office space in Midtown South is limited, it is difficult for landlords to find tenants with the resources necessary to secure an entire floor at asking rents that were – at least as of this past January – nearly $80 per square foot.

The 850,000-square-foot, 16-story 200 Fifth Avenue was built in 1916 and renovated in 2008. That project – led by STUDIOS – upgraded the tower’s infrastructure, installed LED lighting in public and common spaces, and installed a rainwater collection system to support its green roof, bamboo-filled courtyard, and hanging gardens. 200 Fifth Avenue was the first New York City landmark to earn a LEED rating.

Tiffany will continue to occupy 400,000 square feet on the 9th through 14th floors. Other office tenants at 200 Fifth Avenue are Grey Group on 2 through 6 and 7, and IMG Worldwide, also on 7.

Later this week, after years of lobbying by local community boards for improvements, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh will formally announce plans for a significant redevelopment of the East River waterfront. Serving as both a storm barrier and urban recreation zone, the East River Blueway Plan was developed by lower Manhattan-based planning and design firm WXY Architecture + Urban Design.

Currently in the design phase, the 4-mile-long project would stretch from the Brooklyn Bridge north to East 38th Street and reinvigorate one of Manhattan’s least accessible waterfronts. It would build wetlands, pedestrian bridges, parks, a bike and walking path, and even a sandy beach underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The wetlands would not only improve aesthetics but also act as a storm barrier against tidal surges from future superstorms like Sandy. Mr. Stringer has already pledged $3.5 million in funding to kickstart the project.

But the design’s most intriguing technical component is at East 14th Street and ConEd’s substation, where the FDR Drive is flush against the waterfront (image above). The Blueway proposes a flying pedestrian bridge over and around the FDR that would connect with the waterfront, where a storm wall would provide additional surge protection for the substation. And, at two of the waterfront’s natural coves (at 14th Street and beneath the Brooklyn Bridge), the Blueway would remove bulkheads and install tidal pools and beaches for both recreational and river-cleaning purposes.

“The wetlands provide a natural buffer against storm-related surges that can cause major urban flooding,” said Claire Weisz, AIA, WXY’s founding principal, in a press release. “We’ve been working with people in the affected neighborhoods and a local ecology center, and we realize how much flood protection and waterfront access would improve their lives.”

Related and Oxford Properties Group have announced that L’Oréal USA (402,000 square feet) and the technology firm SAP (115,000 square feet, across the tower’s top four floors) have signed leases at the first office tower planned for the transformative, 26-acre, $15 billion Hudson Yards project on the far West Side.

With the handbag maker Coach already taking a 600,000-square-foot condominium interest, the yet-to-be-named, 1.7 million-square-foot South Office Tower – which is currently under construction at West 30th Street and Tenth Avenue thanks to nearly $1.4 billion in debt and equity financing – is now 80-percent filled.

In a press release, the new tenants praised the project’s potential to transform the way New Yorkers view the far West Side. “The Hudson Yards development is at the core of a pioneering new neighborhood and L’Oréal USA is proud to be part of it,” said Frédéric Rozé, President and CEO of L’Oréal USA. “In establishing a single flagship New York location, our only goal was to find the city’s most innovative development,” said SAP’s co-CEO, Bill McDermott.

“World-class office space like the towers Related and Oxford are building will help keep New York City competitive in the global economy,” echoed Mayor Bloomberg in the same release. “These commitments from leading corporations [such as] L’Oréal USA, SAP and Coach represent an important vote of confidence in our city’s future.”

The 950-foot, KPF-designed South Office Tower (pictured, left) will include an atrium at its base that incorporates a piece of the final section of the High Line, to be preserved as part of KPF’s master plan for the site. Again, that plan calls for 5000 apartments in 9 residential buildings, 6 million square feet of commercial office space with 1 million square feet of retail, a 150-room, 5-star hotel, a 750-seat public school, and 20 acres of open public space.

The project – which will seek LEED Platinum from USGBC – is much more angular than the usual corporate box and, from certain angles, suggests wisps of natural grass that acknowledge Hudson Yards’ overall commitment to green building practices.

The overall development of Hudson Yards will occur in two phases: Phase I, Eastern Rail Yard, from 10th to 11th Avenue between West 30th and West 33rd Streets; and Phase II, Western Rail Yard, from 11th to 12th Avenue between West 30th and West 33rd Streets. That second phase will break ground once tenants are secured. The first phase should be completed by 2017.

In a renovation to what an architecture critic once called a “disturbing” piece of architecture, 375 Pearl Street at one time was slated to become a Class A commercial office building. But now Seattle-based Sabey Data Center Properties has moved into the next phase of turning the 32-story, 1 million-square-foot former Verizon Building into Intergate.Manhattan: the largest high-rise data center in the world. Eventually, the facility will boast 40 megawatts of data center capacity using 600,000 square feet of the building’s floor space, with typical floor plans of 35,000 square feet. It will offer both powered shell (undeveloped space with fiber-optic connectivity which the tenant builds out) and turnkey (landlord builds or has built out the space).

Sabey began the physical transformation of 375 Pearl Street last year after purchasing the former Verizon Building in foreclosure, upgrading its climate, electrical, and other infrastructure systems to support its new functions. It’s also invested nearly $50 million in perimeter security for tenants’ peace of mind. Now, as of just a few weeks ago, Intergate.Manhattan is functioning, providing computing cycles to the New York Genome Center – the facility’s first tenant – for purposes of medical research.

“Ensuring that institutions – whether they’re financial services firms or health care providers or life science pioneers like the New York Genome Center – can securely store, access and share data is key to our city’s tech future,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a recent press conference discussing the arrangement with NYGC. “That’s why Intergate.Manhattan is such an important addition to New York City’s data infrastructure and to our economy.” “This is the most complicated center of its kind in the world,” Dave Sabey, the founder and chief executive of Sabey Corporation, told The Observer  when it reported the story for the first time last summer.

Still, there are concerns that, although Sabey plans to route clean hydroelectric power from its West Coast operations to the facility, 375 Pearl Street could be an energy hog. Whether that turns out to be the case remains to be seen. But with New York City’s increased attraction for the technology industry – from Google’s massive home at 111 Eighth Avenue to the planned Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island – facilities capable of serving these data-hungry companies will become increasingly critical for Gotham to remain competitive in attracting tech sector tenants.

An M&S BREEAM “Excellent” store on the London outskirts.

The UK-based retailer Marks & Spencer has announced a sweeping initiative that will aim to make green-related clauses standard within all of its leases for new shopping center space across the United Kingdom. It will also collaborate with some of the largest commercial property owners in the UK who make up England’s Better Buildings Partnership – including British Land, Canary Wharf Group, and Hammerson, among others – to retrofit its existing leases to incorporate green provisions.

M&S, which counts 760 stores in the UK, will implement the green lease language initially at 70 locations, including the Brent Cross shopping center in London and Silverburn in Glasgow. M&S was specifically interested in developing a green leasing program for its locations in shared environments like shopping centers and retail parks, where the landlord/tenant relationship is more complex because of the inherent nature of those sorts of leasing structures.

The language, whether in new leases or retrofit agreements, is designed for both landlord and M&S to share waste information and data – gas, electricity, and water – in each demised space to encourage savings (what gets measured gets improved, of course). It also contains what appear to be aspirational green lease goals, encouraging the parties to invest in advanced building technologies like biomass boilers and LED lighting to rainwater harvesting and other systems. But it is unclear exactly how those obligations are set forth in the specific language that is being implemented. Still, M&S’s new lease language is based on the Better Buildings Partnership’s own Green Lease Toolkit, a free guide that aims to “break down barriers between tenants and landlords in order to achieve meaningful reductions in the environmental impact of commercial buildings.”

“The BBP has been developing ways to break down landlord/tenant barriers since its inception five years ago,” Keith Bugden, Executive Director of the Better Buildings Partnership said in a press release. “Our industry leading work on green leases, including the publication of our Green Lease Toolkit, has paved the way for this exciting new initiative and I’m delighted that the hard work and commitment of our members has resulted in such a significant breakthrough. We hope of course that this is just the start and that other commercial tenants will see the benefits to be gained from such a partnership.”

“Currently it can be difficult for landlords and tenants to work together when it comes to a building’s environmental performance, particularly for older leases. There’s often no real structure for measurement, incentives or sharing of goals,” Clem Constantine, Director of Property at M&S said in the same press release. “Green leasing changes this situation as it provides the framework within which both can work together. And both will benefit, a store with a reduced environmental impact and lower costs is more marketable for landlords and more cost effective for tenants to occupy – a genuine win, win.”

Seventeen percent of all carbon emissions in the UK come from commercial and industrial buildings, and M&S is in the throes of trying to reduce energy consumption in its stores, offices, and warehouses by 35 percent by 2015 (against a 2007 baseline). Already the company has dropped consumption by 28 percent.

The UK’s BBP was created in December of 2007 and includes British Land Company, Grosvenor, Hammerson, Hermes Real Estate Investment Management Limited, Land Securities, Transport for London and the Mayor of London, Blackstone Group, Canary Wharf, GE Capital Real Estate, Henderson Global Investors, Legal & General Property, PRUPIM, Quintain, Workspace Group, The Cadogan Estate and LaSalle Investment Management.

Omnicom moved into 195 Broadway in 2007 with a 160,000 square foot deal, and expanded last summer by 40,000 square feet. Omnicom’s expansion echoes the increased attention that technology and media sector tenants are paying to commercial real estate opportunities in lower Manhattan: back in January, we noted the publisher Harper Collins’ 180,000-square-foot, 15-year deal at the tower. Thompson Reuters is 195 Broadway’s anchor tenant; The Knot also has space at the tower.

The historic 195 Broadway was built in 1916 and served as the headquarters of AT&T until 1983. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, its 183 exterior columns are original Vermont granite and the tower is rumored to contain the most marble of any building in New York City. After a mid-1980s renovation, L&L earned an Energy Star label for 195 Broadway in 2008, scoring 87.

The image-licensing company Shutterstock is on the move to the Empire State Building. The technology startup has signed a lease for more than 80,000 square feet across two entire floors. After hiring 50 new employees once it went public last October, Shutterstock maxed out its existing office space at 60 Broad Street. The company is the latest in a string of tech industry deals both at the Empire State Building (where LinkedIn expanded its footprint last summer by nearly a third) and elsewhere in Midtown. From 1412 Broadway in the Garment District to 229 West 43rd Street in Times Square, technology industry tenants continue to look at 34th Street and above for the flexible floor plates, office arrangements, and asking rents that continue to be tough to locate in Midtown South.

Still, asking rents at the Empire State Building have hovered in the $51 to $55 per square foot range even in the aftermath of Malkin Holdings’ 3-year, $550 million upgrade to the tower’s infrastructure, offices, and exterior lighting, which has yielded dual LEED-EB: OM Gold and Energy Star certification and also upgraded all 6500 of the 2.9 million-square-foot tower’s windows and modernized its 68 elevators. “We’ve been growing, and what we want is a more collaborative, open environment,” Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the deal last week.  “We were looking for really big floor plates, but if you want to go around there [in Midtown], you’d have to look at three or four floors to get the same amount of space.”

Shutterstock’s lease comes while Malkin Holdings continues to try and convert ownership in the Empire State Building into a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT). Nearly two-thirds of the limited liability company’s unit holders have already voted on the conversion plan (which has preliminary court approval from New York County Supreme Court Justice Peter Sherwood). Malkin is pushing unit holders to continue voting in favor of the conversion to avoid continued litigation costs and other expenses while the REIT is still pending. An outcome on the vote could come as early as this month.

It’s been a long winter, but soon New Yorkers will have a spring break destination in their own backyard. Senor Frog’s, the Florida-based Mexican theme restaurant, has finalized its 22,000-square-foot lease at SJP Properties’ LEED Gold-certified 11 Times Square. The chain will be taking both ground-floor and lower-level space in the 40-story, 1.1 million-square-foot tower, whose leasing efforts we’ve followed closely here at gbNYC. We noted Senor Frog’s deal amid a flurry of other transactions at 11 Times Square last month, including two much smaller retail deals with Bank of America and Off the Wall Frozen Yogurt.

Meanwhile, at 11 Penn Plaza, Macy’s has extended its 646,000-square-foot lease with Vornado through 2035. Located on the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 31st and 32nd Streets, the 23-story, 1.1 million-square-foot tower is certified Silver under USGBC’s LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance rating system. Other notable tenants at 11 Penn Plaza include Madison Square Garden and Rainbow Media Holdings.

Its cola was once the choice of a new generation. Now, with major zoning changes to its new neighborhood approved by the City Council, PepsiCo announced earlier this week that its first office space in Manhattan will be in what will eventually become a new-look Hudson Square.

In a five-year deal, the food and beverage giant is taking 19,800 square feet on the second floor of Trinity Real Estate’s 350 Hudson Street, where asking rents are currently $58 per square feet. Pepsi will spend the next few months building out its new space and expects occupancy by the end of the year. It will join the recent flurry of creative and technology industry tenants that have driven Hudson Square average rents back to their pre-recession levels.

Located between King and Charlton Streets, the 9-story, 335,000-square-foot 350 Hudson Square was built in 1927. In 2012, Trinity earned an Energy Star label for the tower, which scored an 80. Office tenants include the tech firm Medidata (providing cloud-based medical data across 3 floors and 100,000 square feet) and PR Newswire; Pret and Hale & Hearty occupy ground-floor retail space.

“Hudson Square is increasingly becoming a destination for major international brands drawn by the energy and unique character of the neighborhood and the quality of the space,” a Trinity spokesperson told the Commercial Observer. “We are delighted that PepsiCo has chosen to join our growing community.”

While Buffalo may be the country’s rudest city, efforts to transform the Nickel City from its Rust Belt roots into a twenty-first century hub for advanced technology definitely are not. Designed by Perkins+Will’s New York City office, the Barbara and Jack Davis Hall on the University of Buffalo’s north campus hopes to help its School of Engineering and Applied Science position this former Rust Belt city at the vanguard of high-tech industry, green infrastructure, and sustainability.

The $75 million, 130,000-square-foot Davis Hall classroom and laboratory building is home to SUNY-Buffalo’s computer science and electrical engineering departments and was built by Turner’s New York City office. Its hybrid design offers interactive and collaborative learning spaces thanks to a multi-story glass gallery space that integrates pedestrian traffic through the building into campus. It also features a state-of-the-art “cybertorium,” or “smart” auditorium.

Davis Hall is aiming for a LEED Gold rating from USGBC and should help the university in its pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. Its colorful architecture is a bold statement about Buffalo’s plans to become a hub for clean technology, green infrastructure, and associated research, spearheaded by SEAS. Indeed, last week, SEAS hosted the “Western New York Green Infrastructure Forum” in conjunction with EPA. The Forum discussed how Western New York can prepare for, fund and create green infrastructure projects, focusing on land-use, transportation, energy, housing, and stormwater issues.

“Perkins+Will is proud to work with the University of Buffalo to help launch a new generation of interdisciplinary, innovative and sustainable buildings on the UB Campus with the design of the Barbara and Jack Davis Hall,” Robert Goodwin, AIA, LEED AP, Design Principal, said in a press release. “The hybrid program, sculptural form and interactive spaces of the building make a bold statement about the University’s commitment to explore new directions in research, education and collaboration.”

Alvar Aalto’s Housing at Sunila Pulp Mill – 1936

Cooper Union’s exhibit Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture is entering its last week, closing on this coming Saturday, March 23. The exhibit reviews the influence of the natural environment on architecture, profiling 25 works dating between 1925 and 1970 from modernist giants that include Le Corbusier, Paul Rudolph, and Alvar Aalto. Each work was researched, selected, and documented by a group of Cooper Union students, faculty, and alumni. “These buildings demonstrate the importance of the aesthetic of clarity and utility that characterizes 20th century modern architecture. This aesthetic, or really, these values, inform the contemporary green building movement today,” the exhibit abstract notes.

We haven’t seen the exhibit – yet – but according to the Architect’s Newspaper it “makes the case that environmental design has long been a a foregrounded consideration in the creation of architecture and not something created by by the United States Building Council and its LEED certification process.” In addition to 3D models of each of the 25 buildings profiled, the exhibit includes analytical drawings that demonstrate the sustainable design concepts that permeate each piece of architecture. It also features the curators’ proposed design solutions to the challenges of particular climates: cool northern zones, hot arid zones and tropical and subtropical zones, as well as a timeline illustrating the evolving global environmental consciousness.

You can find Lessons from Modernism at The Cooper Union’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, 7 East 7th Street, on the second floor, between Third and Fourth Avenues. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Let’s switch up our geographic focus for a moment and take a quick jaunt over to the other side of the world and check in with the first office building under construction at Alice Lane Offices, a 1.7 billion Rand mixed-use development in Sandton, a suburb north of Johannesburg, South Africa (pictured). The 200,000-square-foot tower is being developed by Abland Properties, which recently earned 4 stars for the project under the Green Building Council of South Africa’s (GBCSA) Green Star South Africa v1 program – the 30th building nationally to earn a Green Star designation. It should be ready for occupancy later this summer, with two more towers – including a 175,000-square-footer coming online in the fall of 2014 – in the works. Green features will include energy-efficient lighting, natural daylighting, and environment-friendly construction materials.

The three towers will be linked by a central, landscaped piazza slated to include a variety of retail components. The building itself will be one of the first in South Africa where a landlord has incorporated green concepts into its office leases. But it’s unclear exactly what those green lease terms include and how strict any rights or responsibilities running to either landlord or tenant might be.

To that end, Alice Lane is of interest because last summer GBCSA launched its Green Lease Toolkit, which noted some important trends in South Africa’s leasing climate, particularly with respect to “hard” green leases (where provisions may penalize a party for failing to satisfy certain green lease objectives). In terms of those types of leases under prevailing South African regulations, it noted “the absence of regulation governing the operational energy use of buildings means that performance-driven green leases with penalties are unlikely to be widely adopted in the short term.” However, the Toolkit did note that the South African Treasury has “indicated their preference for a carbon tax and the new building regulations include energy efficiency requirements. . . . Occupying and/or owning green buildings provide a buffer against these potential future regulatory changes.” So Alice Lane could be ahead of the curve.

In a press release, Abland lauded the Alice Lane project team’s engagement with future office tenants early in the design process, allowing each stakeholder to understand the benefits – and, presumably, risks – associated with the green building process. “From the outset, all involved in the development were aware of their roles, and the different benefits they would derive from the green building. Abland is very proud of having achieved this Green Star SA rating, and has committed to constructing the second and third buildings at Alice Lane as Green Star SA buildings, to create the first Green Star rated precinct in the area,” said Abland project manager Janet Glendinning.

The Alice Lane Offices development is located in Sandton City, Johannesburg’s financial district, with access to highways and the Gautrain station nearby. Nedbank, RMB, and JSE all have their office headquarters located within the district. GBCSA was established in 2007 and projects 60 Green Star-rated projects by the end of 2013. More than 400 Green Star SA accredited professionals in South Africa.

It’s been a while since we explored green leasing issues here at gbNYC. But we talked about the topic extensively over at GRELJ and encourage you to download our archive white paper on the subject here if you’re interested in diving into it in much more detail.