Dan Winters

Dan Winters is the managing principal of Evolution Partners, an advisory firm specializing in high-performance, environmentally responsible real estate projects. He works with leading real estate developers and owners across North America to financially maximize a client's "return on sustainability" by triangulating and coordinating the market positioning/messaging, leasing and financing perspectives, which includes debt and equity capital raising for green projects. He also consults with select real estate firms on both corporate strategy and asset-specific strategy concerning sustainability-related aspects, then works directly with executive management on strategy implementation. Dan was the first, and remains one of the few, LEED-accredited financial professionals. He is contributing author to two ULI textbooks including "Professional Real Estate Development: The ULI Guide to the Business" and "Green Office Buildings: A Practical Guide to Development," has authored numerous trade journal articles on green building finance, and served as special advisor to Building Design & Construction's white paper "Green Buildings and the Bottom Line." As a green building finance expert, he has been a keynote speaker and a panelist at industry events across North America including the ULI's national conferences on sustainability, Canadian Real Estate Forum, Greenbuild, regional conferences for ULI, NAIOP and USGBC, the Green Building Alliance, BetterBricks, Cascadia Northwest, NAREC, Canada USGBC and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, among many others. He is a member of the Gerson Lehrman Group Real Estate Council and is the Vice Chairman of the Board for the USGBC Baltimore Chapter. In addition, Dan was a member of the District of Columbia Mayor's Green Building Task Force, which worked to successfully pass the DC Green Building Act. He is currently involved in an international capital markets initiative to incorporate green building attributes into investment banking origination and rating agency underwriting processes. He is also involved in several start-up companies including LoraxPRO.com, a customer-focused software product that increases the efficiency of the LEED certification process through technology and automation. Dan was formerly a member of the Real Estate Private Equity Group at the Frank Russell Company, which manages or consults to over $2.5 trillion in investments and is one of the largest institutional pension fund consulting firms in the world.  While at Russell, Dan developed qualitative and quantitative assessments of numerous real estate private equity management firms regarding investment strategies, vehicle structure, management team quality and overall execution capabilities while placing in excess of $650 million in client capital. He was a voting member of the Russell Real Estate Operating Committee and provided internal institutional portfolio management including real estate strategy, portfolio reallocation and investment manager selection to various Russell real estate funds. Following Russell, Dan was the founder and CEO of a venture-capital backed internet e-commerce company that was an early entrant into the fast-growing internet arena in the late '90s. In addition, he worked at one of the largest real estate finance and investment intermediaries, the top-producing office of CBRE/LJ Melody in Washington, D.C., which did in excess of $2 billion in debt and equity financings in 2004-2005. Dan earned his master's degree in Real Estate Finance and Development from Harvard Graduate School of Design where he was the top graduate in his degree track, an MBA from Southern Methodist University and a BS in Consumer Behavior from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is slated to instruct a graduate practicum course on sustainability in the Real Estate Development program at University of Maryland in 2009.