Greystar – Caroline Melville – 2025

Summary

During the 12-week Climate Corps fellowship at Greystar, Caroline Melville, a Master of Science candidate in Sustainability Management at Columbia University, launched a successful Resident Smart Thermostat Survey to 10 Greystar communities, representing 2,700 units across 4 states.

Goals

This survey was designed to assist Greystar with creating an impactful resident engagement strategy to reduce energy usage for the over 1 million residents that call a Greystar apartment home. Resident energy usage is a key component of multifamily real estate owners’ sustainability programs as well as an increasingly important component to building performance standard compliance. The survey results identified barriers and benefits that residents face when they use their programmable thermostat in their Greystar residence. Caroline brought her learnings from one of the top sustainability programs in the world, as well as her background in development and relationship building to engage Community Managers and other stakeholders to successfully manage the survey and achieve a 13% participation rate.

Solutions

Caroline used guidance from Doug McKenzie-Mohr & Jennifer Tabanico’s book: Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. Community-based social marketing is the gold standard for sustainable behavior change programs utilized by thousands of organizations to foster sustainable behaviors including those that lead to increased energy efficiency. This book, along with a previously launched engineer energy survey, laid the groundwork for the Resident Smart Thermostat Survey. Caroline created a robust communication strategy, launched a pilot survey to two Greystar managed properties, made refinements and then launched a 3-week survey to 8 Greystar owned properties.

Potential Impact

This survey will be used by a senior level committee to create a strategy to increase resident engagement around energy use and reduce the risk of noncompliance with Building Performance Standards. With 70-80% of a property’s energy output hinging on a resident’s personal usage, Greystar wanted a methodical way to engage residents that focused on the nuances of human behavior. This survey has the ability to impact Greystar’s 1 million plus residents in over 3,700 communities across the US and world.