Becca Rushin, Director of ESG at Jamestown

As the Director of ESG, Becca has been an instrumental part of building out the sustainability program at Jamestown. She was one of their first sustainability hires and has been growing with the company for almost a decade. She is responsible for overseeing ESG initiatives across the entirety of Jamestown’s global portfolio, spanning the US, Europe and Latin America.

Watch the video below to learn more about how Becca got involved with sustainability and how that manifested itself into her career at Jamestown.

How did you first get involved with sustainability?

Growing up on the coast of Georgia helped spark my interest in sustainability. I spent my summers going to coastal ecology camps and also spent a lot of time outside on the beaches and on the river.

When I went to college, I also spent my time learning about environmental education and eventually discovered the concept of sustainability. I was reading books like “Cradle to Cradle” and “Natural Capitalism” and it got me really interested in figuring out how businesses can make decisions that are more beneficial and less harmful for the environment.

What is your role at Jamestown?

I now serve as the Director of ESG, but I started at Jamestown almost 10 years ago as an administrative coordinator working in our development and construction department. I was actually Jamestown’s first sustainability hire, which was really neat, because we had just finalized and launched the Jamestown Green program, our corporate property and portfolio level initiative that focuses on environmental, social, governance across all of the Jamestown projects.

ESG has evolved a lot since I first started, and there has been a big push for transparency around our environmental performance. In the last few years we’ve also seen a real drastic increase around social issues, particularly around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It’s been exciting to see growth and progress in that area.

Is there a particular sustainability or ESG initiative that you’ve worked on during your time at Jamestown LP that you are most proud of?

There’s a lot that I am proud of about our sustainability program, but I would say my biggest accomplishment was holding Jamestown’s first Global ESG Summit in the middle of a pandemic in 2020. Not only did we pull that off virtually, but it was also a great opportunity to bring leaders within the firm together from all of our global offices. We have operations in Cologne, Germany, and Bogota, Colombia, and we were able to get a great group of folks together to brainstorm a number of solutions related to ESG. I think that the work that has come out of that meeting has been really transformative in democratizing ESG across the company.

What does your day to day looks like at Jamestown?

No day is the same. For those of us in commercial real estate, we spend a lot of the first half of the year working on reporting and the second half of the year executing and budgeting. A lot of that time is spent lining up projects, whether it is an efficiency project or a certification project, as well as gathering data.

Right now we are in the middle of finalizing all of our 2021 performance data. Oftentimes, even though you’re doing something for a reporting purpose, you can still make it useful in terms of actually improving the efficiency of your asset. For example, when we get our annual performance data, that allows us to evaluate how our buildings are performing and how they compare to each other, it allows us to prioritize buildings that might need a little more attention.

Is there any technology that you are using to help you with your reporting?

We use a handful of technologies, starting with our utility bill automation. We partner with Schneider Electric and Cass Information Systems to pay and automate all of our landlord paid utility bills. That data goes to Schneider Electric’s Resource Advisor platform and gets mirrored in Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager, from there all of the data from Energy Star gets mirrored in Measurabl. We use Measurabl as our environmental reporting platform for our portfolio. In addition to tracking performance data, we also add in projects, audits and certifications. We use that as a basis for a lot of our voluntary reporting, such as reporting to GRESB, but we also use it to gather information that we can use for our own sustainability report as well as case studies and award applications.

Can you tell us more about Jamestown Green?

Jamestown Green is our proprietary program for sustainability efforts at the property, portfolio, and corporate levels. I like to break Jamestown Green down in a couple of categories: monitoring and tracking and ongoing energy management. Monitoring and tracking involves tracking our utility bills and reporting on them in our annual performance reports. We utilize a variety of technologies to manage energy at our buildings. Because we have a diversified portfolio in terms of use types, as well as different geographies, there’s not really one single software tool that works for all of our projects. We have technologies that monitor our energy consumption on a 15 minute interval basis, and even more granular data that helps our operators run their buildings smoothly.

We are also really engaged in overall planning. I am involved from the pre-acquistion phase through disposition, which includes due diligence analysis and creating a sustainability plan for each property. Those ESG goals get integrated into each property’s business plan every year.

Jamestown Green really is a comprehensive strategy that engages in all aspects of our operation at Jamestown.

How large is Jamestown’s portfolio?

Jamestown operates in the US, Europe, and Latin America. We have over $13 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2021, and our portfolio represents over 25 million square feet of property of predominantly office space, mixed-use, and retail space, with some residential property as well.

And you oversee ESG across the entire portfolio?

Yes, I work closely with a number of collaborators both internally and externally. Most recently we have been working closely with our Innovation Technology team, and with that group we are vetting and piloting a number of new sustainability related technologies.

How does technology and emerging prop tech fit into helping you achieve your sustainability goals?

Technology is a crucial part of both running our buildings but also finding opportunities for improving our resource consumption. Most of our work to date has been done around energy management, such as occupancy tracking and other types of smart building technologies like indoor air quality management, or even occupancy engagement through our tenant experience app called HqO.

Overall, with all of our innovation technologies we’re really trying to just improve the tenant experience.

What are your top 3 priorities for Jamestown this year?

First, Jamestown has a 2050 commitment to net-zero operational carbon and we made that commitment in 2020. So this year I am really working to make some meaningful progress towards that goal using a regional model. My goal is to have at least 1 property where we are really making some aggressive short term improvements towards our net-zero goal and then using those projects regionally as examples that the other teams can learn from.

Additionally I’ve been working a lot with our timber team. Jamestown is very hands on with our real estate business and we are also an investor in timberland in the US, through our Timberland Fund. It tells a really interesting story, because in the business growing and cutting down trees you’re essentially sequestering a really meaningful amount of carbon. Years ago, we figured out that our annual growth in timber sequesters more carbon than our buildings emit. In the last couple of years it was 3.5x more carbon being sequestered. We have been exploring natural capital solutions in the form of a carbon benefit so that we can potentially monetize that carbon that is being sequestered out in our forests.

Lastly, my other top priority is executing and finishing the technology pilots in our buildings. We’ve used energy management technologies for a number of years and what I envision is having a collection of best in class technology and software tools and partners that we’ve worked with to prove the concept and that we can deploy strategically based on the project context.

How do you approach conducting your pilot programs when testing out new technologies?

I try to do as much work behind the scenes as possible, so that I can pre-vet solutions and then I target the buildings that need it the most. There’s really not a ton of software solutions that I think apply across the board, so we take it on a case by case basis.

Are you currently working on any retrofits within your portfolio?

We always have retrofit projects going on. The best opportunity for a retrofit is when a tenant moves out or when a space is turning over. We use that opportunity to engage with new tenants and figure out how we can make their buildout as sustainable as possible. We are also looking at the various legislative requirements that are coming out of our local municipalities.These regulations often relate to various building aspects such as energy usage and carbon emissions. So we overlay those requirements with our own goals. We do energy audits to identify savings opportunities and we also do ongoing commissioning and retro-commissioning to ensure that our buildings are operating as they were designed to.

What advice can you give to anyone who wants to start pursuing a career in sustainability?

I think it is important to really get a feel for what interests you the most. It might be health and well-being, resilient design, mechanical engineering, or it might even be technology and software. There’s many different paths to take to start a sustainability career.

My most concrete advice is to line up networking interviews and do as much research as you can in terms of what your day and lifestyle will be like. I also think it is a good idea to pursue professional certifications or accreditations, particularly if you don’t have a sustainability background, but might have a lot of expertise in your industry.