Waiting for Stimulus Bill Funding to Green Your Commercial Property?

 

Commercial property investors are so busy stabilizing their weakened portfolios, that it’s no wonder that the news of an impending stimulus package makes everyone hopeful.

Over the past few days we have received several summaries of the announced House Stimulus bill that is being proposed by the Obama administration. We found a brief, quick summary of the Stimulus Bill here that you can take a look at.

The news for green real estate finance and investment?

The federal government’s focus within this bill is on several sectors closely tied to federal contracting, community and private residential activities. But not much of anything for investment commercial real estate (sigh). Particularly, not for the greening of your commercial real estate assets.

Residential housing does garner some funding. But when you do some basic math, you can quickly estimate that it does not translate into larger dollars per homeowner (i.e. questionable effect at that level).

Is this wrong?

Remember,  commercial property owners with federal and state tax liability may still qualify for federal incentives to offset the cost of energy efficiency retrofits, depending upon the level of energy demand reduction that they achieve. That is in addition to any other utility rebates and state incentives their projects qualify for  — such as renewable energy, for example.

Of course, it would have been better if the federal government had included funding for green or energy efficient retrofits to commercial real estate now that so many property owners are on board with greening their properties.

But apparently we’ll have to see if the directing of funding to these other sectors may indirectly help markets where green properties operate.

Your thoughts? Do you think that the proposed Stimulus Bill should contain specific funding for the greening of commercial real estate?