Trump’s Environmental Changes and CRE Climate Tech: What to Know

Take a deep breath. You have nothing to worry about.

In effect, that was the message from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when it announced earlier in February that greenhouse gases (GHGs) — including carbon dioxide, methane and four other GHGs linked to climate change — will no longer be limited by the EPA.

Debatable as the EPA decision may be — it is expected to be challenged in multiple lawsuits by various states and environmental groups — the effect on climate-focused proptech and real estate remains to be seen.

Some proptech observers believe the EPA ruling is misguided, but do not fear dire repercussions for the industry.

“I actually don’t think it will affect it very much,” said Catie Sirie, North American solutions leader for facilities management, energy management and footfall analytics at proptech giant MRI Software. “I think it sharpens what clients or companies are trying to do, because even as federal changes are happening and programs at the federal level might be going away, there’s still a lot of local and building performance standards. The operating imperatives and leveraging energy information to do things like control operating expenses and meet building performance standards don’t go away.”

It is important to remember that any changes in federal regulations don’t remove the risk posed by GHG emissions, Sirie said. 

“It just removes the reporting and the emphasis on those things,” she said. “From my perspective, I see that we can help clients stay focused on what really matters to them:  operating smart, efficient buildings, protecting their assets, and then making informed decisions.”

MRI’s energy division is largely focused on energy management, according to Sirie, with some clients using that tool for energy efficiency and building operations, while others also use it for sustainability.

“I think we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about how companies want partners that can help them weave through all the noise,” she said. “It’s really important to sharpen what the most important key performance indicators are for companies and then find solutions or priorities that align to those.”

Mike Zatz, senior vice president of global data ecosystem and partnerships at San Diego-based Measurabl, a data management platform for commercial real estate focused on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG), brings a unique perspective to the administration’s decision.

Zatz joined Measurabl in October 2025 after 22 years at the EPA, the last 19 leading the agency’s Energy Star portfolio manager program, an online tool that can be used to measure and track commercial buildings’ energy and water consumption as well as GHG emissions.

“I came to Measurabl to extend and build on the success that we had at EPA with the Energy Star program in trying to build a common data set for energy, water and emissions, and to grow that North America and, ultimately, globally,” said Zatz of the proptech company that claims to be the world’s most widely adopted sustainability data platform for real estate, tracking sustainability performance across more than 18 billion square feet in 93 countries. “We saw at Energy Star how much value there was to having a central repository of data that everybody could tap into for all kinds of needs, whether it’s regulatory, lending, due diligence or whatever. That doesn’t really exist anywhere else.”

Despite his relatively recent transition from the public to the private sector, Zatz does not see his former agency’s decision as having a disastrous effect on proptech or the real estate industry.

“In the real estate world, I don’t believe there will be any real significant impact,” Zatz said. “And that sounds like a strange thing to say. I think last week, it was like, ‘The sky is falling.’ And, don’t get me wrong, it’s a bad thing for sure. But in the real estate world — in proptech, software, data — I don’t actually think there’s going to be any significant impact.”

As Zatz explained it, the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” as the regulations are known, basically allowed the agency to regulate GHG emissions in a manner similar to regulating other pollutants, which has been done for decades under the U.S. Clean Air Act. Prior to that finding, GHGs couldn’t be regulated.

“Now that’s being repealed and you can’t regulate those gases,” said Zatz. “So the key word in all of that is ‘regulate.’ The EPA, generally speaking, doesn’t regulate the real estate industry in terms of air emissions. There’s some other things — hazardous waste and things like that — but, largely speaking, there’s not a lot of federal regulations in terms of air regulations that impact the commercial real estate industry.”

The addition of the capability to regulate GHGs didn’t have a significant impact on real estate when it was first put in place, Zatz explained.

“Now that it’s being repealed, it’s not going to have a very big impact, either, not directly,” he said. “It primarily impacts the automotive industry. That’s where probably the biggest impact would be. Then the other sectors where it would have a big impact are in manufacturing and the power sector, meaning the generation of electricity. So that last one is probably the only significant place that it ultimately would touch the real estate industry, but very indirectly.”

Zatz and Sirie agreed that local and state laws relating to climate disclosure requirements would continue to have a greater impact on real estate owners and operators.

CRE climate compliance initiatives will be driven primarily by “the local and state benchmarking laws and building performance standard laws,” Zatz said. 

“Over 50 jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada have benchmarking laws; about 15 or so now have building performance standards, which either put caps on energy use of buildings or emissions from buildings or both,” he said. “Those still remain. I think we’re still going to see some growth in that area, but it’s not going to cover the whole country. It never will, I think, but they do cover a lot of the major cities. 

“And, now, a lot more of the action we’re seeing is on the state level as more states are getting involved. Then you also layer on top of that the climate disclosure laws you have in California and in New York, and those are going to require the larger real estate companies to disclose their climate impacts.”

In addition, the need to manage climate risks and improve building performance remains an imperative, said Sirie.

“The operating priorities and leveraging energy information to do things like control operating expenses and meet building performance standards don’t go away,” she said. “And it really helps to focus a lot on what companies are doing. So I don’t think it will have that big of an impact, but in some cases it can help to drive a lot of focus for decision-making.”

Regardless of the latest EPA ruling, the real estate industry will have to continue to be alert and nimble in addressing GHG issues, said Zatz.

“I think people — whether it’s proptech, owners or companies like Measurabl — probably would have built it in already,” Zatz said of the industry having already seen what was coming and making adjustments. “One thing we’ve seen from this administration is what they say they’re going to try to do, they do. They are not hiding anything. There’s another factor here too, which is that this will certainly be hung up in court for quite some time. Already there have been court cases filed against it, and eventually one will make its way to the Supreme Court. I believe the Supreme Court already upheld the endangerment finding once, but now the court has changed, so that could change.

“But I think if anybody on the investor side of proptech were looking to pull back, I would say it should be quite the opposite. This will only increase the need for what the proptech companies are offering.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.