What the end of Energy Star could mean for commercial real estate

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

Most people think of Energy Star as the little blue sticker on their appliances that tells them they will see some measure of energy-efficiency savings on their utility bills. But Energy Star, a public-private partnership administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is a lot more than that. Now it is reportedly on the chopping block as part of massive budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

Roughly 2,500 builders, developers and manufactured housing firms participate in the Energy Star Residential New Construction program, which sets strict energy-efficiency guidelines required to earn its designation. Last year, more than 8,800 commercial buildings earned the Energy Star, saving more than $2.2 billion and preventing more than 5.7 million metric tons of emissions, according to the Energy Star website. 

Even more critical to property owners, Energy Star also includes a software platform that is the fundamental infrastructure for energy tracking across commercial real estate. The EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager tool connects utilities to landlords and then to dozens of state and municipal governments who rely on it to uphold their energy and climate policies, many of which include tax breaks and financial subsidies for energy savings.

The EPA announced massive job cuts and restructuring in early May, and while it didn’t specifically mention Energy Star, numerous reports, citing EPA documents, say it is part of the plan.

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement, “EPA is continuing to work to implement the reorganization plans that were announced on May 2, 2025. EPA will provide updates on these plans as they become available.”

The agency declined to comment further. 

Landlords rely on Portfolio Manager data to maintain compliance with state and municipal regulation and to gauge energy performance of buildings in their portfolios and decide which ones need upgrades. Such upgrades could include new HVAC and lighting. 

The tool was used by more than 330,000 buildings last year, comprising nearly 25% of all commercial building floorspace in the U.S., according to the EPA’s website. Seven states, 48 local governments and two Canadian provinces currently rely on the program and its software for their energy benchmarking and transparency policies, according to the agency. 

“There is a potential that they would defund the entire software platform. And so if the system disappears, the data disappears with it, and what this means is that that hub, that connected tissue around how utility landlord and state and municipal governments share energy data across them, that would all go away,” said Leia de Guzman, co-founder of Cambio, a real estate operations platform. 

At the very highest level, Energy Star Portfolio Manager supports $14 billion in energy cost savings per year, according to Guzman. 

“If you don’t have the data, you then don’t have any means to understand how to deploy retrofit initiatives across your building,” she said. 

Cambio, which ingests building data in order to automate real estate operations, can tap into Energy Star data from the past and is offering building owners and managers the option to back up data that already exists. It could not, however, get future data if the EPA takes its system down.

Industry organizations including the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), National Apartment Association (NAA) and National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) are fighting for the program’s existence. The concern is that if Energy Star, including the Portfolio Manager, were to lose federal backing and then be managed by a private entity, costs would go up.

“It’s a $32 million program for the government, but it provides, in terms of return on investment  — it’s huge,” said Nicole Upano, director of public policy for the NAA. “It provides hundreds of billions of dollars of savings for consumers and businesses in its current form, and if it were to be managed by an external company, that might result in a fee-based system that would increase the cost to use this program.”

If Portfolio Manager were no longer a government program,…