Ground zero carbon

publication date: Feb 20, 2008

Government’s zero-carbon challenge has seen pressure on housing developers to design and implement eco-friendly homes, reports Lee Middleburgh, MD of Peverel OM.

Property management company, Peverel OM is mindful that housing and being green go hand-in-hand, and it isn’t just developers under the spotlight. Eco-friendliness is not just on the agenda of those building houses – it is on the agenda of everyone in the supply chain and the fact is that it can’t be an option for businesses, it should be a pre-requisite for everyone involved in the building industry.

Like most, we have already started looking at ways of ensuring that we are doing everything we can to be more environmentally friendly.

We are fortunate that our parent company, Consensus Business Group, leads the way with a strong environmental pedigree in not only practicing green and supporting the Renewable Energy Foundation (www.ref.org.uk), but also ensuring ‘its rapidly growing environmental portfolio encompasses a wide range of technologies that strive to prevent climate change and contribute towards a cleaner, renewable environment’.

While these credentials are in keeping with the desires of our developer clients, we are beginning to assess ways in which we can encourage residents within the developments that we manage to become more eco-friendly. While the introduction of HIPs is controversial, the environmental statement can be considered positive for residents: while we cannot legislate for individual energy use, for the first time, the energy efficiency of communal areas is being assessed, and as such we can both reduce the emissions and at the same time, the energy bill, which benefits all.

On daily basis, where possible we encourage residents to recycle, use energy efficient light bulbs and we are about to introduce car-sharing clubs. Fundamentally, we have also invested in technology in our endeavour to go green – developing our award winning property portal, Avenue, that provides a paper-free means of communicating to our residents in real-time, since most transactions are carried out online.

Most people are eco-minded and we welcome feedback from residents on how we can improve our service to them, which includes green issues.

Improvements

However, while we can assess this feedback and indeed make our own recommendations to landlords, environmental improvements can be expensive. The result is that while there is little or no incentive to make changes to older buildings, the danger is that they will often remain unchanged.

We have also started the process of adopting some core environmental values into the business, which include the purchasing of products that have been recycled, are reusable or bio-degradable; researching ways to promote new environmentally-sound products and encourage early introduction; the pursuance of certification of environmental standards; purchasing low energy lighting, computers, office and electrical equipment and machinery; and promoting paperless administration systems. These are just some of the things that we consider important.

At Peverel OM we realise the importance of our own eco-credentials both to our developer and residential client base. We know that we have to have our own house in order to meet the demands that developers will increasingly be required to make, as well as the expectations of residents for whom climate change is already very high on the agenda.

Further information

Peverel OM has more than 100,000 customers across a portfolio of 70,000 properties nationwide. This equates to over 1,000 developments, the company employs more than 750 Staff nationwide and is part of the  Peverel Group.
For information on any aspect of the leading services provided by Peverel OM, please visit www.peverelom.co.uk. For information on Street Car schemes in operation, visit www.streetcar.co.uk