Editor’s Note: ILFI is here as a resource for you and your team on your sustainability and continuing education journey. That is why we are bringing you this story from Neal and Alissa at Latitude, both LFAs.
Let me start by saying that real estate sales was never on my radar as a career path. After meeting my partner Alissa in graduate school, we decided to dovetail our lives and careers together. We first worked together on a cultural heritage project in India. That led to work with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on climate change adaptation and threatened species conservation projects in the Maldives (with the whale shark being the keystone species).
The work was challenging and it combined our passions and values for environmental stewardship. However, it was not financially sustainable. We were barely making ends meet. Furthermore, the non-profit organizations we were working with were always at the mercy of financial benefactors that had their own respective agendas, which seldom aligned with the project needs.
While on a trip back to the US, we listened to a podcast that sparked the idea of real estate as a path towards financial freedom. We thought that it could provide financial stability that would then enable us to pursue the purpose-driven and environmental projects we truly cared about.
We began by doing residential renovation projects in Portland, Oregon. We would buy small apartment buildings that had significant deferred maintenance to fix and hold as rentals. This led to us creating our own property management company to oversee the projects and manage the buildings. We then were solicited by other landlords that needed help managing their own rental properties. We obtained our real estate licenses and built a company. Over time we became a brokerage and eventually built the company to nearly 20 agents and several hundred residential and commercial properties under management.
After six years, however, something wasn’t clicking for us. We weren’t in alignment. There was no greater impact than the bottom line. We could no longer continue to devote our time to building a company that didn’t have a deeper purpose. We were getting tired of the business-as-usual approach and wanted to incorporate sustainability into our company Latitude.
Around the same time, three of our four parents had come down with cancer. These were relatively young and healthy people that should not have been getting diagnoses like these. We began to research the root causes of cancer, and what we found mystified us. We came to realize that our homes — the very places that we rely upon so that we can rest, rejuvenate, love, and raise our families — were built with materials that caused chronic long-term health issues and were environmentally harmful.
This was not a concept that was being talked about in the real estate industry. Furthermore we found that sustainability in real estate had become more about electrification, energy efficiency, and lots of greenwashing. Products that were detrimental to our well-being were getting promoted as sustainable.
It then began to become clear that there was a critical need for the transactional side of real estate to provide better counsel to real estate buyers and sellers. We wanted to help catalyze a change in our homes and habitats to help both people and the planet thrive.
We had been inspired by the regenerative agriculture movement for over a decade, and decided that a regenerative approach to real estate was not only possible, but necessary to address major challenges in the 21st century. Out of that, regenerative real estate was born. The operating framework became four pillars—health and wellness, sustainability, community, and ecology.
We knew that the Realtor community had a long way to go to incorporate regeneration into its vocabulary. While architects, urban planners, and designers were already making headway in this space, the sales side of the business was lacking. We wanted to integrate this process to help introduce these concepts to clients and connect them with resources like financing options and an ecosystem of value-aligned vendors and practitioners.
Years ago we had been introduced to the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) through Green Hammer, an Oregon-based design/build firm that specialized in green building. We were making plans to do a development that we were going to attempt several Petals of the Living Building Challenge. When we started to put out our message of regenerative real estate, we revisited ILFI and immediately saw the value to become Living Future Accredited.
While regenerative real estate still is an emerging practice, it certainly isn’t business as usual. There is a mission that resonates with people. We now have real estate agents that we call Latitude Change Agents that want to combine their values with the powerful financial model that real estate provides. These agents are located across the country in cities such as Portland, Eugene, Denver, and New York. We require the agents to become Living Future Accredited as a way to help them ask generative questions about what could be in the built environment.
We are now growing our ecosystem around the world and using our business as an opportunity to promote the designers, developers, builders, and other businesses that are spearheading regenerative design and development. We host a show called The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast that interviews visionaries and agents of change within the real estate community.
And it’s working.
We are finding that there is a groundspring of people—young and old—that are seeking out ways to live more sustainably. From zero waste, to permaculture, to passive house, people are looking for better ways of living that aren’t detrimental to their health or the environment. This isn’t just relegated to eco-luxury developments, but for people all across the globe.
From roof, to soil, to soul, we pride ourselves on being different. Our counsel combines the best of the real estate world with the critical mission promoted by ILFI to help our communities become more socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. We do it property by property, client by client.
From ILFI: If you are interested in pursuing your LFA, either on your own or as part of a team, please reach out to education@living-future.org or learn more about our Living Future Accreditation here.
