When it comes to certifying buildings across the United States for energy efficiency and sustainability, Breana Wheeler has been focused on expansion in the past year.
As the head of BRE Group's United States division known as BREEAM USA, she's led her company, part of the United Kingdom-based consultancy BRE Group that sets international sustainability standards for buildings in 89 countries, in accelerating its growth in America.
In 2022, the number of BREEAM-certified properties in the U.S. jumped nearly 160% based on the total number of certifications issued year-over-year. The company's name is an acronym for Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology.
The firm is also broadening its geographic reach. Last year BREEAM certified buildings for the first time in Delaware, Kentucky, Maine, Ohio and Oregon as well as Washington, D.C., to bring the number of states with BREEAM-certified properties to 27.
BREEAM USA now counts 300 buildings on its rating list in America, with the number doubling in the past year. Wheeler has been at BRE Group since 2016, overseeing its United States division by building on her background in sustainability.
"One of the reasons I was drawn to real estate was sustainability," said Wheeler, who's based in San Francisco. "The thing that has driven me since I was young was to make the world a more sustainable place, to protect the environment, to protect people."
Wheeler is a native of Reno, Nevada. She earned a bachelor’s in geography and political science from San Francisco State University and a master’s in environment, politics and globalization from King’s College London in 2007. She started her career in London as Skanska Infrastructure Development’s United Kingdom sustainability officer. She then went on to work at infrastructure and business services company Mouchel, engineering firm Atkins and sustainability consulting company BuildingWise before joining BRE Group in June 2016.
BRE Group is a more than 100-year-old scientific research organization founded in 1921. Owned by a trust the firm operates as a non-government organization. BRE Group launched BREEAM in 1990 as a sustainable standard for buildings, the first in the world. BRE Group, which has about 550 employees worldwide, has operated in the United States since 2016.
"Our goal is to help businesses and align sustainability with their other more traditional financial perspectives," Wheeler said. "They can use this to manage risk and opportunity as they move forward. The certification is about transparency."
BREEAM, which is widely used in Europe, typically uses licensed assessors to rate a property’s energy efficiency and sustainable operating credentials under its established methodology. The assessors, who are trained and licensed by BRE Group, examine a building's design construction and water and energy use. To create BREEAM scores, the third-party assessors rate each property for its level of sustainable practices. The clients hire them, and the assessors set their fees, but BRE reviews and certifies the assessors' ratings.
As BREEAM works to grow in the United States, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, system is still the most recognized and used green building rating program in the country. BREEAM, the oldest method of determining a building's environmental impact and sustainability rating, and LEED are the two dominant green building systems in the United States.
The United States Green Building Council, or USGBC, the nonprofit group that developed the LEED certification system, administers that building-rating platform. The United States is the largest market for LEED certification, with 511 million square feet of buildings being LEED-certified as of 2022, according to the USGBC. When certifying a building, the USGBC takes into consideration everything from materials used to construct buildings and how the materials were delivered to a job site to a building's carbon output and level of waste produced.
BREEAM USA looks at 50 different asset types. Wheeler said the group's system has a far broader scope of ratings than other standards, and she expects 75% of buildings in the United States should be able to achieve some rating at some point.
"When we started in the U.S., the real estate industry saw sustainability as an awards program. You show your credentials and maybe bump your rent premium because it was something people would pay for," said Wheeler. "Sustainability was for urban Class A office tenants because they were willing to pay for it. Kind of to make themselves feel better. It was nice to have, but there was a swath of tenants who would not pay for it."
The focus today needs to change from survival to how we can thrive under the sustainable model, Wheeler said.
"How do we prepare communities?" she said. "Real estate, from its impact, is an important place to work."