There are two reasons that Robyn Hyslop won the Jeff Robinson Environmental Award from the Property Council of Australia’s Victorian division.
One is the work she does in her job to progress sustainability and the carbon transition at major real estate agency Colliers in Melbourne early this month. The other is the extra-curricular work she does for the same ends.
Hyslop’s day job as director of sustainability, is primarily to help property managers, and easing and capital markets agents to handle the ever growing challenges facing their clients, whether owners or tenants – essentially the demands of a modern energy-aware marketplace.
There’s the need to electrify, find low-cost renewable energy and deal with the huge and tricky challenge of retrofitting a building to respond to the net zero transition.
That can mean anything from figuring out energy loads, space constraints for heat pumps, what technology to use and circular economy expectations.
That’s the technical underlying piece, but Hyslop also knows this needs to be couched in a compelling story that can reach both CFOs and their bevy of advisors.
Without building a good value case for improving the carbon profile of buildings there’s the risk of stranded assets.
So at least a big part of the award, we can surmise, was based on impact and scalability because, in our view at least, agents and property managers are significant proponents of change that we need fully onside for the net zero transition. Their advice is weighted strongly by clients.
It’s a property manager’s job to understand ongoing operational expenses, project and manage the impact of utility price increases on tenant outgoings, Hyslop told The Fifth Estate in an interview on Tuesday. It’s also an agent’s job to read market conditions, understand underlying trends and advise on often expensive investments.
Hyslop’s job is to empower both the property managers and agents with answers.
Tenants might say, “we want to be in a building that is 100 per cent renewable” and they want to be low carbon, but you can’t claim the building is 100 per cent renewable energy if you are still using gas, she notes.
They might want to know if the building will be fully electrified in the future and if so, “where’s the plan?”
She loves the challenge, particularly how to manage the low carbon transition of existing buildings.
Existing buildings is where the excitement kicks in
“My desire to work with existing buildings probably started because I could see the changes coming with Green Star’s Climate Positive Roadmap. I was already working on trying to convert new buildings to electrification before they got too far down the design path, but what about all the existing buildings that would need to transition?”
Her background is a degree in solar engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she was taught at times by Martin Green, famous for his role in developing solar photovoltaics.
She then worked at Lendlease in the sustainability group and learnt “all about building physics and NABERS” while working on some “big and wonderful buildings” before joining Colliers in Melbourne, three years ago.
“I’d been working on the Melbourne Quarter redevelopment for six years and could see the wave of work coming in the electrification of buildings.
“I thought, where do I need to be to be part of this work?”
There was the allure of “all those great new buildings” but as much as she admires their achievements, she notes: “you can do almost anything with a blank piece of paper and when you’re starting from scratch”.
Hyslop gives full credit to the transformation and leadership of “stellar buildings” such as Cbus’s 435 Bourke Street, or 101 Collins Street in the CBD. That’s an easy sell for agents, she says, because “they tick all the boxes”
But for other buildings in the B and C grade areas it’s a “slow burn”.
“I wonder if it’s this year or next year, we will start to see a lot more movement because Green Star has now ratcheted up its net zero pathway to a minimum of 5.5 stars NABERS Energy to achieve the higher ratings. And we will start to see Green Star ratings dropping if they can’t achieve a certain level or have decarbonisation plans in place.”
One thing that might help is the tax incentive for energy efficiency offered through the Managed Investment Trusts, motivating owners to spend on efficiency and decarbonisation measures or risk losing the incentive
There’s also the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards that will start to soon apply pressure on corporates to make improvements, but she says it’s still early days for that.
Among her extra-curricular activities Hyslop has been part of a organisation founded three years ago called the Sustainable Building Operations Forum facilitated by the City of Melbourne and the Facility Management Association and other leading advisory agents.
Its role is to elevate sustainable outcomes by growing the capacity and capability of the professionals who operate and manage our built environment.
The organisation builds on work formed by a similar UK group founded by the Better Buildings Partnership in the UK.
The group has so far adapted a Responsible Property Management Toolkit to the Australian market and developed an ESG Handover Checklist to help in the handover of buildings and portfolios to new property managers when contracts expire so that sustainability plans and learnings can be retained and built upon.
Jeff Robinson would have loved this, Hyslop says. Finding ways to bring others on the journey.
This much-loved sustainability champion has clearly been an inspiration to Hyslop, and many others.
“He had an uncanny ability to remember everyone’s name and he always asked how the good fight was going,” she says.
For herself, she confesses to being “a little bit excited because I’m an energy efficiency nerd.”
Two years after his death, it’s clear the Jeff Robinson magic continues to live on.
