#EE50in22For the past two years, Anita Jeerage has served as the Director of Sustainable Real Estate for Unico Properties, a private real estate investor, developer, and operator across six emerging markets throughout the United States. Anita leads the Sustainability department, which supports property management, engineering, and development teams in implementing high-performance building strategies related to energy and water efficiency, waste management, low-carbon transportation, and indoor air quality. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and received her graduate degree from the University of Southern California in Building Science. Further, she is LEED AP BD+C WELL AP Certified.
Take us through a typical workday. What are a few of your ongoing responsibilities?
Unico’s Sustainability team, which I lead, is an integrated part of our Real Estate Services department. I am humbled to lead a team of six talented and hard-working sustainability professionals. On a typical workday, I support my team in researching and implementing efficiency and decarbonization initiatives across our 17 million SF real estate portfolio. I also collaborate with my colleagues in other departments, including serving as a member of Unico’s ESG Steering Committee, to ensure sustainability is a value-add component of our business.
What are some of the biggest challenges your company/organization will be tackling in 2023 and beyond?
For the Sustainability team, one of the initiatives we will be tackling in 2023 is creating decarbonization plans for each asset and ensuring they have a path to compliance with new building performance legislation within our markets. With all the other headwinds facing commercial real estate, we will have the added challenge of ensuring these capital projects get financed and add long-term value to the asset.
What was a successful project or implementation you worked on at your company that you can share? Do you have any tips that would help colleagues at other companies who are contemplating similar projects?
In September 2022, Unico celebrated the repositioning of Galleria, a historic building in downtown Portland. Sustainability was a cornerstone of the transformation – the building eliminated on-site fossil fuels and is designed to achieve an energy use intensity that is 80% lower than a typical, modern office building in the U.S.
Building electrification is a critical strategy for achieving carbon neutrality and reducing GHG emissions from the building sector – especially in markets like Portland where the utility has its own decarbonization goals. It is critical to set these goals early and ensure that everyone is on board. I am grateful to my colleagues at Unico and the design and engineering teams at Galleria who approached this objective with a shared commitment to decarbonization.
I enjoy reading, and one of my favorite books this year was suggested by a friend and colleague, Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Working in sustainability is hard; we are each doing our part with the hopes that others are doing the same, and collectively we will make a difference. But progress is slow, and the realities of climate change are here. For me, reading Ministry for the Future offered a perspective on the power of human creativity and ingenuity; it offered a picture of hope.
Connect with Anita and the rest of her team at Unico
