A curiosity for sustainability that was sowed years ago has culminated in the BOMA Canada Elaina Tattersdale Sustainability Champion Award for Lynn Heaston, the director of commercial property management for Colonnade BridgePort.

Heaston, who has been in her role for over two years, received the accolade for her leadership in promoting sustainability in property management practices, according to Ottawa-based Colonnade. The company develops, manages and invests in commercial and residential property Canada.

Landing a job in property management after graduating university, she pursued the opportunities buildings offered her to cultivate leadership, Heaston told Sustainable Biz Canada in an interview.

Acting on her interest in sustainable building by learning about the BOMA BEST and LEED programs, she later joined the Existing Building Committee of the Canada Green Building Council’s (CAGBC) Ottawa chapter as vice chair.

After doing all of this before “sustainability was sexy”, as she put it, Heaston has has spent the past couple of years guiding Colonnade's strategy from promises into deeds.

Discovering opportunities in sustainability

Her pathway into green buildings was largely self-directed, sparked by her personal and professional interest, Heaston explained.

A program introduced by the CAGBC was “very attractive to me,” she said. “I really liked the opportunities that were available to improving building emissions and what we could do in terms of project building, to make things more efficient.”

As general manager of Apollo Property Management, she applied her knowledge about LEED to a 30,000-square-foot building the prospective tenant wanted to certify under the standard.

Leaving Apollo in 2015 to work for Huntington Properties, she was involved in a project to retain the roof of a building during a replacement. Instead, a sealant was put over existing material to expand the lifespan by 20 years at a fraction of the cost of replacement, while also improving on the energy loss intensity.

After Apollo, she moved to BentallGreenOak as a property manager in 2020.

When she joined Colonnade in 2022 to head the operations of its commercial portfolio in Ottawa, the firm had a limited background in green certifications, Heaston recalled.

“There were no collaborative programs in place,” with sustainability-related work only taking place when there was a possibility to certify a property.

She helped guide an overhaul of Colonnade’s governance and operations to more firmly embed sustainability into the company's procedures.

Colonnade’s ESG commitment under Heaston

Recognizing there was no platform that offered a portfolio-wide, holistic perspective, she spearheaded the creation of an ESG steering committee. Assembling experts from all levels of management, the group partnered with the Canadian Institute for Energy Training to teach Colonnade’s property managers and operators strategies to save energy in its buildings.

Later, more committees were formed, centred around topics such as community investment, governance and regulation, asset strategy, and tackling greenhouse gas emissions and energy.

Colonnade engaged with decarbonization software company Audette, which gave the company a window into the carbon footprint of its buildings and helped surface opportunities to reduce emissions.

All of Colonnade’s properties were put under the Energy Star benchmark platform, which captures the data to identify room for improvements. Previously, only six of the company's properties certified for a score; that total stood at 22 properties as of 2023.

A major decarbonization effort involved Colonnade addressing two existing gas-powered rooftop units in the 450 March Rd. office building in Ottawa, which were swapped with electric resistance heaters.

In response to the BOMA award, Heaston said it's rewarding to see the success of the projects she has seen progress from paper to completion.

Colonnade is advising in the decarbonization of a six-property portfolio that is mostly industrial. Additionally, it is devising an ESG scorecard for the 178 assets it manages, which total 14 million square feet.

By Q1 2025, Heaston hopes to have Audette’s data reporting available for its investors. Also, Colonnade is striving to improve the Energy Star scores for an institutional client that holds data centres in its portfolio.

A changing perspective on sustainable buildings

When she started in sustainability, few in the industry were interested, Heaston recalled. But since the COVID pandemic, interest has risen considerably. Now, investors are asking how to boost energy efficiency to reduce operating expenses and help with marketability.

In 2023, Colonnade saw requests for ESG policies when purchasing buildings, and investors behind refinancing policies demanded to see environmental certifications.

“Its improvement impacts owner costs, tenant costs,” she said about sustainability.

Financing is the real trouble, Heaston observed. Often, the first step to decarbonizing a building is tackling the building envelope. But it can cost millions of dollars justs to replace windows, and the return on investment can sometimes take 30 to 40 years.

In response, Colonnade starts by picking the low-hanging fruit to make the greatest improvements in building efficiency, and stays abreast of support programs such as the Deep Retrofit Accelerator Initiative that can help fund expensive equipment rehauls.

To newcomers figuring out how to succeed in sustainability, she recommends understanding where the education gap resides.

“We tend to lean on consultants to advise us; they don’t have enough consultants in the world to get us to be able to decarb(onize) all buildings in the next period.”

Educating oneself as much as possible, seeking opportunities and breaking down the issue into easy wins and incentives offers a good pathway forward, she said.