The U.S. Green Building Council quietly launched a new program for portfolio owners, and most of the market hasn't noticed yet. PERFORM is built for organizations that want to set sustainability targets across an entire real estate portfolio and have their progress verified by a third party, without putting every building through individual LEED certification.
It's not a certification. It's not a replacement for LEED. And it's not a scoring system. It's something genuinely new in the USGBC stack, and if you manage real estate at scale or advise people who do, it's worth understanding now, before your peers and your clients start asking about it.
A quick note on naming before we go further: the official program name is just PERFORM. "LEED PERFORM" is shorthand that many people use because USGBC owns the LEED brand, but technically, PERFORM is a separate program operated by USGBC and verified by GBCI. We'll use PERFORM throughout this guide, and explain how it relates to LEED in detail below.
PERFORM is a portfolio-level sustainability performance program from USGBC. Third-party verification is provided by GBCI (Green Business Certification Inc.), the same body that handles LEED verification.
The model is simple in principle. A portfolio owner enrolls a defined set of properties, picks one or more performance metrics to track, sets a target, gathers evidence, and submits for verification. GBCI reviews the evidence against the requirements published in the PERFORM Performance Metrics document. If the target has been met, GBCI issues a Verification Letter, a formal statement that the portfolio achieved the claimed performance.
Two important distinctions to internalize early:
It produces verification, not certification. PERFORM does not award Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum levels. There is no scoring tier. The output is a verified statement that a specific performance target was met across a defined portfolio in a defined reporting year. The verification process is informed by ISO/IEC 17029:2019, the international standard for validation and verification bodies.
Targets are self-defined. USGBC does not prescribe what "good" looks like. The portfolio owner sets the goals, using one of two performance approaches: absolute performance (verifying a number or percentage against the portfolio in a reporting year) or performance change (verifying improvement from a baseline year). This is the program's defining feature and its central design choice. PERFORM is intentionally low-barrier-to-entry, meeting organizations where they are rather than asking them to clear a fixed bar.
Enrollment, target-setting, evidence tracking, and verification submission all happen through Arc, USGBC's portfolio platform.
The eligibility net is wide. Any organization with operational real estate assets can use the program: non-profits, government agencies, listed and unlisted companies, funds, direct investment portfolios, joint ventures, and special purpose vehicles. The only structural requirements are that the organization owns, manages, or controls the assets in the portfolio, and that the portfolio contains more than one property.
In practice, the program is most useful for:
That last category is worth pausing on. PERFORM is well-suited to portfolios where individual-building LEED certification would be impractical: too many assets, too varied, or simply not the right starting point. Rather than pursuing LEED on a single flagship building and ignoring the rest, an organization can use PERFORM to establish portfolio-wide measurement and reporting discipline first, and then channel selected buildings into LEED later.
This is the area where confusion is most common, and it's worth getting right. Three things to keep distinct:
LEED certification evaluates individual buildings against a common set of prerequisites and credits, scored on a fixed scale that produces Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum ratings. It is available for new construction (BD+C), interiors (ID+C), and existing buildings in operation (O+M). Each building stands on its own.
LEED Volume is a delivery mechanism, not a separate rating system. It streamlines the certification of multiple similar new-construction projects by certifying a prototype design once and applying it across many sites, useful for retail rollouts, hotel chains, or standardized branch builds. The output is still building-level LEED certification; the process is just more efficient.
PERFORM is something different. It evaluates operational performance of an existing portfolio against self-defined targets, and produces verification rather than certification. There are no scoring tiers. The unit of evaluation is the portfolio, not the building.
A side-by-side comparison:
| LEED certification | LEED Volume | PERFORM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit of evaluation | Individual building | Individual buildings (prototype-based) | Portfolio (more than one property) |
| Output | Certified / Silver / Gold / Platinum | Certified / Silver / Gold / Platinum | Verification Letter |
| Targets | USGBC-defined thresholds | USGBC-defined thresholds | Self-defined by the portfolio owner |
| Scope | Design, construction, or operations of a building | Design and construction (scaled) | Operational performance across a portfolio |
| Barrier to entry | Higher; must clear fixed thresholds | Higher; must clear fixed thresholds | Lower; set your own targets |
The most important takeaway: PERFORM is not a competitor to LEED. It's a complement. We'll come back to that later in this post.
PERFORM supports 20 portfolio-level performance metrics organized into eight categories. The breadth matters. This is a comprehensive sustainability framework, not a narrow program. A quick orientation to each category:
Emissions covers greenhouse gas accounting and reductions across the portfolio, including Scope 1, 2, and 3 considerations.
Energy addresses portfolio-wide energy use, intensity, and renewable energy sourcing.
Water covers consumption, intensity, and conservation across the portfolio.
Waste addresses waste generation, diversion, and recycling rates.
Health focuses on indoor environmental quality and occupant experience, the category most directly relevant to indoor air quality, and the one we'll go deeper on below.
Resilience addresses how well the portfolio is prepared for climate-related risks and disruption.
Biodiversity covers ecological impact and habitat-related considerations across portfolio sites.
Social Impact addresses social equity, worker safety, and community-facing dimensions of portfolio operations, including, for example, worker health and safety planning.
A portfolio is only required to track one performance metric to meaningfully engage with the program. The owner chooses which categories matter most to their stakeholders, their reporting obligations, and their operational reality. This is part of what makes PERFORM accessible; there's no requirement to address all eight categories at once, or even more than one.
The Health category contains four performance metrics, all focused on indoor environmental quality and occupant well-being:
1. IAQ Testing. One-time spot-testing of indoor pollutants and air quality metrics across portfolio properties. For example, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. The metric verifies the number or percentage of properties where this testing was completed during the reporting year.
2. Continuous IAQ Monitoring. Ongoing measurement of indoor air quality using continuous monitoring devices installed in occupied spaces throughout the portfolio. The required parameters include carbon dioxide (CO₂), particulate matter (PM), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), among others. USGBC specifies that the devices must be "building grade or better," a meaningful technical requirement that excludes consumer-grade devices and points portfolio owners toward purpose-built commercial monitoring solutions.
3. Indoor Environmental Quality Assessments. Portfolio-wide assessments of indoor environmental conditions conducted on a 12-month basis, evaluating each asset for IAQ and occupant health issues. The U.S. EPA's IAQ Building Education and Assessment Model (IBEAM) is one of the assessment frameworks USGBC explicitly cites.
4. Occupant Satisfaction Survey. A questionnaire used to determine occupant satisfaction with the indoor environmental quality of each property, including the percentage of properties where a survey was completed and the overall satisfaction score. Compliance with LEED O+M v4.1's IEQ Performance prerequisite or WELL v2's C04 Occupant Survey precondition can satisfy property-level documentation requirements.
The continuous monitoring metric is where the program's direction is clearest. USGBC has explicitly moved toward continuous, real-time data and away from one-time spot checks across LEED v5 and PERFORM alike. The reason is straightforward: spot tests describe a moment, while continuous monitoring describes operational reality across seasons, occupancy patterns, and HVAC modes. For portfolio owners trying to verify performance to investors, regulators, or tenants, the difference is significant.
This is where solutions like Kaiterra's commercial monitors and the Kaiterra Data Platform fit naturally. They are purpose-built for the kind of building-grade, portfolio-wide continuous monitoring that the PERFORM Health metric calls for. We've covered the technical details of how continuous IAQ monitoring works in our comparison of indoor air quality in LEED v5 and LEED v4.1 certification for readers who want to go deeper on the underlying methodology.
PERFORM and LEED are complementary by design. USGBC makes this point directly: the performance metrics and technical requirements in PERFORM are aligned with LEED, which means evaluating a portfolio through PERFORM helps prepare the individual buildings within it for LEED Operations and Maintenance certification.
In practical terms, that creates a sensible pipeline:
Reframing the question helps clarify the relationship. The choice is not "PERFORM or LEED?" The better question is "what's the right entry point for this portfolio?" For organizations with many assets and limited certification appetite, PERFORM is a low-barrier way to start. For organizations with a defined set of priority buildings, LEED certification at the building level is still the right tool. Many portfolios will eventually use both.
If your portfolio has more than one property and any reporting obligation like ESG, investor, regulatory, or otherwise, PERFORM is worth evaluating now. The barrier to entry is low by design, and the program is still early enough that being a thoughtful early adopter carries real positioning value with stakeholders who care about sustainability disclosures.
The most useful next steps:
Ready to get started? Connect with a LEED AP on the Kaiterra team to talk through how continuous IAQ monitoring fits into a PERFORM-aligned portfolio strategy!