Welcome to the Green Lease Library, a centralized site for commercial green leasing resources

What are Green Leases?

Green leases (also known as aligned leases, high performance leases, or energy efficient leases) align the financial and energy incentives of building owners and tenants so they can work together to save money, conserve resources, and ensure the efficient operation of buildings.


Why Are Green Leases Important?

Building leases lay out how energy costs are divided between tenants and owners.  Often, these leases are not structured in a way that promotes energy savings. Under most gross leases, for example, tenants have no incentive to save energy in their leased premises because energy costs are based on tenant square footage. Under most net leases, building owners have no incentive to invest in efficiency for their building systems because the operating expenses are passed through to tenants, who would therefore receive all of the energy cost savings.

Click here for a recap covering a green leasing forum in Montgomery County, Maryland from April 25, 2013.

Green leases promote energy efficiency by creating lease structures which equitably align the costs and benefits of efficiency investments between building owners and tenants.

Slides from the U. S. Department of Energy's Green Leasing Webinar for State and Local Governments:
On Tuesday, February 26th, 2012 the Department of Energy's SEE Action Network presented a webinar on High Performance Lease strategies for state and local governments. Download the webinar slides as a PDF.

About the Green Lease Library

This website is the result of a collaboration among several stakeholders in the green leasing community (see below), and is maintained by the Institute for Market Transformation.  The website's purpose is to consolidate green leasing resources to provide a one-stop-shop for all audience types-- from building owners and tenants to lawyers and building raters.  The green lease library is organized by resource type, and resources are tagged by relevance to audience and building types.

Note: Any opinions expressed by the webinar speakers or in materials found in the library are not representative of the opinions of the partner organizations