Green Hotel Development - Demystifying LEED. By Jim Butler, Hotel Lawyer Monday, 26th May 2008

Hospitality Lawyer on green hotel development - Howard J. Wolff 's presentation at The Hotel Developers Conference provides a comprehensive overview for the panel he moderated, "Demystifying LEED: What's All the Fuss About?"

For the past five years, the Global Hospitality Group® of Jeffer Mangels Butler and Marmaro LLP has presented The Hotel Developers Conference™.

Each year, this high level conference focuses on a current, cutting-edge issues such as resort development, condo hotels, and hotel mixed-use. In 2008, the conference, supported by UNLV and the USGBC, Nevada Chapter, was devoted solely to green hotel development, renovation and operation.

Just as hotel prototypes evolve from Generation 1 (or "Gen 1") to Generation 2 ("Gen 2") and beyond, hotel conferences on sustainability to date (the "Gen 1" conferences) have typically included only a panel or two on sustainability -- and have been limited to covering why the industry should consider going green, or what "green" really means.

The Hotel Developers Conference™ 2008 set the standard for "Gen 2" of hotel conferences on sustainability.

Demystifying LEED: What's All the Fuss About?

Although my short summary here could never replace Howard's excellent narration of this slideshow, I think this is a reasonable overview of what he presented in the slides below:

1. The first few slides show although green building has not penetrated the entire hospitality industry, it is now continuously showing up in our industry literature, the AH&LA agenda, Marriott's first green conference center and the importance of LEED certification for U.S. hotels.

2. The ABCs of LEED, the USGBC and its certification of properties as well as professionals, the explosive growth of USGBC membership from less than 102,000 to more than 14,000 in 2008.

3. The economic rationale for green building and some beautiful role models of green hotels.

The full presentation 'Howard Wolff of WATG at The Hotel Developers Conference™ 2008' is available at HotelLawBlog.com and Howard can be reached at hwolff@watg.com.

There is also a rich library of articles on green hotel development. (Just go to the blog, search down the right hand side for "Topics" and then click on "Green Hotels."). But as we now publish the DVDs from our recent conference on green hotels -- which are free to all conference attendees -- we thought many of our readers would like to see the major PowerPoint presentations from our high-powered speakers, so we have published them for your benefit, or will publish them here shortly.

This is Jim Butler, author of www.HotelLawBlog.com and hotel lawyer, signing off. We've done more than $50 billion of hotel transactions and more than 100 hotel mixed-used deals in the last 5 years alone. Who's your hotel lawyer?

 For more information, please contact Jim Butler at jbutler@jmbm.com or 310.201.3526.

Jim Butler is one of the top hotel lawyers in the world. GOOGLE "hotel lawyer" or "hotel mixed-use" or "condo hotel lawyer" and you will see why.

Jim devotes 100% of his practice to hospitality, representing hotel owners, developers and lenders. Jim leads JMBM's Global Hospitality Group® -- a team of 50 seasoned professionals with more than $50 billion of hotel transactional experience, involving more than 1,000 properties located around the globe. In the last 5 years alone, Jim and his team have assisted clients with more than 100 hotel mixed-use projects, all of which have involved at least some residential, and many have also involved significant spa, restaurant, retail, office, sports, and entertainment components -- frequently integrated with energizing lifestyle elements.