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Green Building Materials: Top Reasons To Become an Expert Seller

Posted by Tom Lombardo | Mon, Jul 14, 2014 @ 10:00 AM

recycled building materialsBuilding materials suppliers and manufacturers have innovated to meet the market’s accelerating demand to replace outmoded technologies with green ones perhaps more effectively than any other industry.

It’s impressive. The pace of change is nothing short of remarkable, and building supply owners and managers who stay ahead of the curve – and who help their clients win and keep contracts – will earn greater market share as this transformation unfolds.

In a marketplace with proliferating technologies, many of your clients will rely upon you to know what they should use. From your client’s point of view, two major drivers impact his ability to compete, and the more closely you track them, the better:

1. Government Contracts Create Private Demand

In a working paper that was updated in May, Harvard Business School analysts who have been studying the impact of environmental requirements for government building contracts in California since 2001 determined that private demand follows governmental requirements.

Municipalities that insisted upon LEED certification for any new public projects caused contractors, predictably, to obtain certification. Those contractors, in turn, needed building supply companies who had the expertise to recommend which supplies would earn the most LEED points for their bid.

The study determined that this infusion of expertise into a community created demand unto itself – and not just in the municipalities whose governments started it. The private market in neighboring counties also showed an increase in demand for LEED building, indicating that demand spread faster than governmental influence.

The authors write, “This suggests that the mechanisms of a government procurement policy…don’t stop at the border…Committing in advance to build green [has] spillover effects for the adoption of green-building practices, for both supply…and demand.”

Know what your clients are bidding on, and know where those bids will lead them next. That way you can be sure to provide them with the building materials expertise that will help them win new contracts.

2. Learning and Innovation Guarantee Expansion

LEED Building StandardsSince LEED is a private endeavor without the force of law behind it, those involved seem just as intent on creating an excellent process as they are in creating an excellent outcome.

At a recent conference exploring the use of toxic chemicals in the building industry, for example, analysts noting that “only 5 out of over 84,000 chemicals in the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) database have been banned or restricted by the EPA…in 38 years,” lamented that “chemicals are treated as ‘innocent until proven guilty’ with regards to their health effects due to flawed national policy. Why is the burden of proof on the public rather than the industry?

Most of the public wonders why, too, and so LEED sets out to build confidence by continuously analyzing its own requirements to make sure they actually help attain the goals of environmental quality and sustainability. For example, LEED analysts acknowledge that reflective roofing has become something of a fad even though the environmental justifications for it remain inconclusive, and so they set out to create balanced and effective guidelines.  And they readily acknowledge that LEED-certified buildings have yet to show a measurable improvement on workplace happiness, meaning the industry has more to learn and do.

And now that web-based dashboards can determine the effectiveness of LEED certified building practices after the building is completed and occupied, analysts expect this influx of new data will have a dramatic impact on the development of building materials – and demand. In fact, when a dashboard was used to analyze the U.S. Green Building Council’s very own headquarters, their building dropped from Platinum to a Gold rating, prompting several refurbishments.

This thirst for knowledge defines the industry and drives the innovations that underlie the demands your clients face when they bid on projects. As a building supply company owner or manager, the more you know, the better. “Green procurement policies…increase awareness of the LEED standard,” the Harvard paper concludes, “and foster the development of complimentary markets,” particularly the one you serve.

Green Is Not Cheap

The buzzword is “cradle to cradle,” meaning that the ultimate building material can be recycled endlessly to significantly reduce the country’s waste stream, some 40% of which is construction-related, and to keep the country’s homes and offices free of toxic chemicals.

That costs money – much more than traditional cost-driven development – and as the upfront cost of market’s demands arc upwards, the building supply part of any contractor’s LEED-certified bid can become high. Make sure that you not only provide your clients with the materials and expertise they need but that you can also fit their payment plan into your business.

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building materials, eco-friendly

Topics: Building Materials

Written by Tom Lombardo