Good for business, good for the environment.
That’s the catchcry of LJ Hooker’s sustainability program aimed at helping real estate professionals in its franchise national network to cut their biggest business costs – power, paper and petrol – 3Ps.
Launched in early 2012 after extensive testing and piloting, LJ Hooker’s 3Ps program puts sustainability at the centre of the biggest motivators in the real estate sector – sales and savings.
The 3Ps program gives its 600-plus residential, finance and commercial offices across Australia and New Zealand access to training, resources and tracking and reporting software.
As one of the largest franchise networks in the country, the company has leveraged its group buying power with a partner program to give LJ Hooker franchises access to special deals to help drive down costs associated with the use of power, paper and petrol.
LJ Hooker’s National Sustainability Manager Cecille Weldon said the 3Ps program is fundamentally aimed at helping franchises to cut their overheads at a time when many factors are affecting day-to-day costs.
“LJ Hooker is the only real estate franchise network to develop a comprehensive program to help its offices reduce their impact on the environment.
“We believe sustainability is a key issue that will impact the real estate industry in the next decade. We wanted to start with our own offices and lead the industry in providing consumers with information through our resource website liveability.com.au that brings together relevant information on sustainability and property on one site.
“Communication is key. The clear message we got from working closely with our highest sales performing offices was that power, paper and petrol are the biggest overheads in a real estate business.
“So we focused our training, support and partnering program – on the business costs that were most relevant to our people,” said Ms Weldon.
This decision to focus upon power, paper and petrol has generated high levels of support and buy-in among a number of leading LJ Hooker’s franchise outlets.
Best of all, by helping local LJ Hooker offices save money on their operational costs it will also have the virtue of helping them reduce their impact on the environment.
Why? Because the flip side of reducing the use of power, paper and petrol will be lower CO2 emissions, energy use and natural resource use, such as trees. This will therefore be a win for business and the environment.
The saying that one can only manage what one can measure is also true of business sustainability.
For the past year LJ Hooker has been monitoring and reporting the sustainability performance of its corporate offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane Adelaide, Perth and Auckland with CarbonSystems’ Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP).
The cloud based software cuts the time and cost of managing corporate environmental information by streamlining the capture and tracking of energy, fuel, water, emissions and other consumption data from utilities and third party suppliers.
At a corporate level, LJ Hooker’s head office has seen a 17 per cent reduction in power use in the past year, and an average five per cent decrease in power use across its state offices.
ESP produces financial grade sustainability-reporting capability and the insight businesses need to accurately target costs saving programs.
CarbonSystems created a customised 3Ps dashboard enabling users to easily monitor, measure and report their power, paper and petrol expenses each quarter.
Cheryl O’Connor, an LJ Hooker agent based in Algester, near the Brisbane, Queensland has used ESP to make changes in the use of office printers and paper.
“Recording and monitoring the office 3Ps data is straightforward and simple,” she said. “The dashboard results speak for themselves and my experience with partners like Upstream has shown there are cost savings to be made.”
Learn more about LJ Hooker’s 3Ps program here.
CarbonSystems helps companies to improve their sustainability measurement and reporting.
Our Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP) is cloud-based software that streamlines the capture and reporting of quantitative and qualitative source data in energy, emissions, the environment and corporate social responsibility reporting.
Our software is used by 110 clients in over 50,000 locations in sectors such as corporate property management, education, electricity and gas, government, food services, fast moving goods distribution, information technology, mining, logistics, and professional services.
Our clients include blue chip companies and organisations around the world, including the CSIRO, Colliers International, Canon, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, Fortescue Metals Group, Fuji Xerox, The GPT Group, LJ Hooker and Microsoft.
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