Shari Gurkin

Graduating with a Master of Science in industrial engineering in 2013, her career began in Energy and Sustainability at JLL’s commercial real estate sector where she took a leading roll in the development and implementation of over 15 fortune-500 companies’ energy efficiency programs that addressed improving their global and local building portfolio’s impact on climate change. Shari has since taken the real estate industry on with force, being honored by Real Estate Weekly as one of New York’s 2019 Leading Ladies in Real Estate. Since joining Fairstead’s Energy and Sustainability division in 2018, she has centralized her focus on driving Fairstead’s mission of innovating the approach to affordable and multifamily housing. By leveraging federal, state, municipal and utility energy rebate programs to improve environmental performance and conditions in our affordable housing, she has secured over 1.4 million dollars in funding and is working to obtain another half a million by the end of 2020. The relationships she has built with program representatives have allowed Fairstead to take on a myriad of projects including working with agencies to develop pilot programs aimed at creating incentives for energy measures installed by building owners. She is also managing the deployment of Fairstead’s water conservation program across the portfolio, identifying half a million dollars in annual savings from tariff change alone. Her past experience in utility data analytics, has made her an expert in recognizing and rectifying incorrect utility billing (totaling over $65,000 in refunds from utility providers to date), as well as managing energy platform data (bringing data accuracy across the platforms from 30% to 100%). Shari has been able to significantly reduce building greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption, modernize building systems to provide better heating and cooling in addition to cleaner air while helping propel Fairstead’s mission to improve the tenant experience in the built environment.