Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could go to your favorite podcast app and hit subscribe, do a review. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Owen Barret.

And our topic is solar on multifamily, good for owners, good for tenants. And let me tell you about Owen. Owen is a former global energy manager at a Fortune 500 company, implemented 60,000,000 in clean technology before founding Lumeo, a niche Yasiel that hit 8 figures in three years. After a successful exit, he launched ZNE Capital to decarbonize commercial real estate, acquiring 654 units worth 75,000,000. Frustrated by solar deployment challenges, he founded Shine, now a leading turnkey solar solution for multifamily properties. Shine is set to decarbonize 200,000 apartment units with on-site solar by 2030, accelerating clean energy adoption where it's needed most. Owen, welcome to Awarepreneurs.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

That's some pretty exciting background you've got. And this whole idea, Owen, of multifamily and solar. Like, you you've done some really cool things both in the commercial real estate and, you know, real estate at scale, And you've done some things in clean technology and clean tech. Why do you think it's important to bring these two things together?

I think it's important to try and deploy clean technology where it makes economic sense. So, you know, I have an under degree undergrad degree in finance. I spent the first part of my professional career in finance. I come at environmental problems from a financial lens. I don't think it's realistic to expect solutions to be implemented if they don't make monetary sense. And so when I look at sort of all of the opportunities across the universe of where you can deploy clean technology, solar on multifirm family, I don't know if it makes the most sense of all the opportunities. It's, like, top five, top 10, and it's wildly untapped. So if if you look at sort of the opportunity combined with just how wide open that opportunity is, it's gotta be one of the, you know, one of the best opportunities in terms of where we can deploy clean tech right now.

And one of the things that I found interesting is a lot of people are building startups, and they have an idea. They're looking at the numbers. There there haven't been robust experiments at scale. Is that fair to say? Yeah. When it comes to clean tech. Right? And one of the things I found fascinating with Shine is that you have the $75,000,000 portfolio, and you're using your own property as a guinea pig. That was your language. Right? Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that. Like like, how did you decide you wanted to try this? And what did you find? 654 units. I'm not sure every single one of them has solar, but a lot of them do. Like, what are you finding as you're experimenting on your own properties looking at it through a financial lens?

Yeah. I mean, the original hypothesis was pretty simple. It was that if done correctly, solar will increase the project level return of a multifamily investment. So if you take the overall investment and say it's a five year hold and you have a 15% IRR, if you layer on top of that solar done right, it should boost the project level return 100 to 200 basis points, which is very significant. So I try you know, I spend my life in Excel. You can model as many things as you want. And in Excel, it's, you know, it it justifies what you're trying to accomplish. But I found that commercial real estate is the oldest, least innovative industry that I have ever come across.