Exploring Sustainable Building and a Greener Real Estate Industry
The demand for greener homes and communities is growing in Canada, but there are still a lot of questions about how we can embrace sustainability in real estate at the personal, professional, and industrial levels.
On the latest episode of REAL TIME, Mark Holland, principal at Westplan Consulting Group and a professor at Vancouver Island University, shares insights on how REALTORS® can become leaders in real estate’s green future, the impacts of climate change within our communities, sustainable home building practices, and sustainable innovations on the horizon.
The episode opens with Holland reflecting on his career and how sustainable building has evolved in the past few decades, highlighting a major shift between 1987 and 1997. “It was fascinating to see all the universities begin to shift, engineering rethinking things, big movement in green buildings, landscape architects revisiting how we were doing our cities, so many different things,” he says. “We now begun to think differently about them. Most generations of professionals since the late '90s have been taught a different way.”
Want to learn more? CREA’S Canadian Certified Green Representative (CCGR) certification is now available for REALTORS®. Designed to educate REALTORS® on how to become environmental leaders and to demonstrate that commitment to their clients and communities, this four module e-learning course is available to start at any time via the CREA Learning Hub.
The evolution takes time, but there has been a very, very big change. I think that's what's really exciting to see in the program here that we're talking about today is that the entire real estate industry is now stepping forward to embed that discussion in every thought and every discussion and decision that we have around the homes in which we live.”
Mark Holland
Holland continues by offering an overview of factors impacting real estate as they relate to weather, and the changes that different regions are seeing as of late. He references two approaches to addressing these issues: mitigation, an older approach, and proactive response.
Throughout the 70-minute conversation with host Shaun Majumder, Holland continues to offer practical insights, like what to look for and what innovation he’s seeing in home building techniques, that REALTORS® can bring into their daily lives and share with their clients.
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