Scoring vs certification: Pros and cons

[Evan_M]

Why putting effort into getting performance scores when only official certifications allow to officially demonstrate green building performance?

Scoring the performance of a site is indeed different from receiving an official certificate from a widely acknowledged institution however I would not oppose the two as they serve different purposes and also connect at some point.

Based on my experience, certification initially started as a label that Real Estate managers seek when they purchase a new building as a way to meet the needs of most demanding tenants. Today, certification is increasingly driven by the need to mitigate risks of owning "stranded assets", ie risk of a site being so obsolete in the design and equipment, that massive investments are required to keep it attractive to most tenants which is more and more the case of unsustainable, energy inefficient buildings.

Therefore, many certification labels are primarily focused on the flagship new-built or retrofitted sites.

Conversely, scoring is performed along the operation of the building and is relevant as much for the new built as for the legacy sites in operation (most of the buildings!). It is a way to keep track of the performance of entire portfolios of sites, and to:

1. Ensure that operations are optimized as much as possible
2. Compare and learn from the best practices from top performers
3. Prioritize the investments to retrofit and raise the performance of the entire portfolio of buildings
4. Identify when a site performance is becoming eligible for certification and recognition from a given label, as many of them have focus on the operational phase in addition of the design phase.

In a nutshell, certification focuses on a few top performing sites while scoring applies to entire portfolios and scoring can prepare the path to certification by making sure all the data are ready to be submitted for review.

@Henri2  Feel free to elaborate based on your experience 🙂