Thomas Stanchak - Director of Sustainability at Stoneweg US

Thomas Stanchak is a seasoned Commercial Real Estate professional with over 20 years of diverse experience. He began his career with his current employer, Stoneweg US in 2017 as an Asset Manager, where he was responsible for overseeing operations, maximizing occupancy, and maintaining budgets for 17 assets in the Midwest region. In 2019, he was promoted to Senior Asset Manager assuming operational responsibility for more than 50% of total AUMs; where his operational leadership was hugely impactful in Stoneweg US’ ability to deliver healthy returns to its investors that year. In 2020, Tom began focusing his efforts on implementing various energy-efficient and innovative practices to his portfolio by introducing water conservation, LED lighting retrofits, and effective recycling methods that would not only incorporate sustainability, but also provide key value-add for residents. Thomas Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Key material ESG issues Stoneweg focuses on Stoneweg’s approach to collecting quality data Evaluation of climate risks and opportunities including climate transition modeling How Stoneweg is preparing for electrification in the industry Thomas’ Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Not everybody is going to agree with you, and not everybody is going to like you, but over time, I've found that if you really work hard and you really do the math around the data and reporting and linking it to finding opportunity, that's the wedge to do things at scale. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Real time energy monitoring and being able to get responsive feedback from these sorts of technologies as we make improvements. The simple example is, as I change HVAC systems, I can actually see the difference in how the property is functioning. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I'm thinking more about multifamily and ESG and that place because I'm sort of responsible for encompassing all of those, as many people in my place are. I bought a book called Safe and Sound, it's by a trans woman named Mercury Stardust. The reason I bought this book is that I read in an article that she is a maintenance professional at an apartment community. She wrote this book because people like her or LBGT people often have to overcome an anxiety or a fear of having people come into their homes to even do minor repairs or do services and that sort of thing. It’s a great book because it opened my mind. I have hundreds of people working in our communities. We have tens of thousands of residents. It kind of opened my mind to a perspective that some people, just to ask for their dripping faucet to be fixed, have to overcome an anxiety; will they be accepted? Will they be treated with dignity? I really found a great affinity with this. I felt like I learned something from the article when I bought the book. I think that more people should be more in tune and more focused on the people that they're trying to serve, the people that lease from you and occupy your real estate. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? If everyone is not using Energy Star Portfolio Manager is nuts, because they should be using it. It's something that the DOE and the EPA are really investing in bringing to the next level. We use several softwares for physical climate risk. We use separate softwares for modeling transition risk and finding opportunities to model how our investments are going to change our carbon intensity over time. We use different software for warehousing the enormous amount of data when it comes to having a large real estate portfolio with separate funds and strategies and that sort of thing. In putting all this data together for measuring the success or the shortfall of how we're investing, how it impacts the stated goals in terms of decarbonization or energy efficiency, it’s a number of technologies that we're employing. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work being done at Stoneweg US? I'm really proud that we've relaunched our website, https://www.stoneweg.us, and there's an ESG optimization section. This is something that I really worked really hard to provide a deep dive into how we're approaching all the material subjects around ESG and how we're making it tactical, going beyond good intentions. It's something that I'll maintain and share our progress and what we learn over time. Part of that is there's no point in me having a Net Zero portfolio, we all need to do it. That's part of the collaboration and that's why our company makes it front facing on our website.