CASE STUDY: HINES

Enhancing leadership through sustainability

Hines, a leading global real estate firm, has worked with GreenOrder to enhance its long-standing leadership in green property development and management and better communicate its success to key stakeholders.

Hines's Challenge
Hines retained GreenOrder to:

  • Evaluate key stakeholders' view of its sustainability activities
  • Refine a comprehensive sustainability strategy encompassing its internal operations and personnel, products and services, and external communications
  • Assist with implementation of key strategy recommendations

GreenOrder's Approach
Key components of GreenOrder's work included:

  • Competitive analysis: Evaluated Hines's competitive positioning on sustainability relative to its peers to determine its comparative strengths and areas for improvement
  • Stakeholder engagement: Conducted targeted stakeholder interviews with customers, developers, and service providers to understand their view of Hines and its sustainability activities
  • Carbon footprint counsel: Made the business case for conducting a portfolio-wide carbon footprint of owned and managed properties
  • Communications guidance: Advised on communications to help Hines authentically and persuasively convey its sustainability activities
  • Expert collaboration: Convened and facilitated a forum of leading green building thought leaders to provide actionable recommendations on technologies, practices, and operations to incorporate into new and existing building projects
  • Internal sustainability advice: Provided guidance on internal greening scorecard for Hines's worldwide offices

Results
With GreenOrder's help, Hines:

  • Updated its Guiding Principles to prominently feature sustainability
  • Established the Hines Center for Excellence to promote, research, and develop best practices and new sustainability initiatives, and to collect and transfer knowledge across the firm
  • Incorporated sustainability considerations as part of its evaluation criteria across its investment portfolio
  • Implemented greener office practices to reduce paper usage and conserve energy, and used the GreenOrder dashboard to track progress and communicate environmental metrics in clear, accessible language
  • Rolled out an internal green office guide adopted by over 88% of its offices worldwide
  • Created a tenant green office guide adopted by nearly 200 tenants to date

Hines website