Q&A with 2024 Client Excellence Award Winner Anabel Schneller

This year’s Illuminate 2024 conference was an amazing week filled with education, innovation, and opportunities to highlight some of the incredible maintenance and operations professionals who utilize Brightly to make a profound impact in their industry and community.

We had a chance to sit down with Anabel Schneller, an ESG Coordinator for one of the nation’s largest real estate investment firms and the winner of Brightly’s 2024 Client Excellence Award. Here’s what she told us about how she got started in her career, why she fell in love with the real estate industry, and how Brightly helps her drive innovation and make smarter operational decisions.

Q: How did you get started at BentallGreenOak (BGO)? 
A: I embarked on my journey with BGO in June 2022, following the completion of an enriching innovation internship at Ivanhoé Cambridge. This experience deepened my understanding of sustainability in the real estate sector, highlighting the intimate connection between ESG principles and innovation within this field. This growing passion for ESG in real estate guided me to BGO. As an ESG coordinator at BGO, my role is to improve the ESG performance of our industrial and office properties throughout Quebec, focusing on integrating sustainable practices into our portfolio management strategies.

Q: What is your favorite part about the work you do?
A: As the real estate industry is responsible for about 40% of global GHG emissions, I love that I get the chance to have the greatest impact in the sustainability field by finding and implementing innovative solutions every day. 

Q: What does your day-to-day look like? 
A: My day-to-day usually starts with Stream. I like to start by downloading a performance summary report of all our properties to see where there are opportunities to improve. I can use the Benchmarking Survey feature in Stream to do this and identify gaps. This helps me to prioritize our ESG initiatives as coordinating decarbonization studies, energy, water, waste audits as well as completing sustainable building certifications as LEED, Fitwel and BOMA best. 

Q: How else do you use Brightly data? 
A: The data and performance reports that we track in Stream allow us to share the building’s ESG performance to our key stakeholders as our clients and tenants periodically. Ever since we implemented this strategy, we’ve seen a big increase in tenant engagement which is essential to meet our client’s ESG goals. My other favorite tool is the plug-and-play feature in the EcoModeler module which is very helpful when having to decide which energy conservation measures to implement as we can analyze the ROI, NEUI projections and GHG savings. 

Q: What has been the biggest benefit of using Brightly software?
A: Brightly software helps us make data-driven decisions which is essential when it comes to implementing ESG initiatives. It’s important to know how a measure will impact our performance and the stream platform has helped us tremendously to better position ourselves by understanding how we should proceed and how we can succeed