Q-and-A with Rachel De Las Casas
Rachel is a Green Building Project Manager at SK Collaborative in Decatur, Georgia, and an NGBS verifier. She was the winner of the 2025 Sustainability and Green Building Scholarship awarded at the International Builders’ Show.
What was your favorite part of attending the International Builders’ Show?
I enjoyed attending the NAHB subcommittee meetings on green building and healthy housing, which allowed me to glimpse how professionals in NAHB can orient others in the organization towards shared strategies and goals to build better in the residential construction industry. Afterward, I was also able to connect with other green builders and consultants from across the U.S through the building science symposium.
What were your biggest takeaways from your experience at IBS?
Hearing first hand accounts in both subcommittee meetings on how members and their markets were affected by Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires cemented the idea that climate resilient practices must become more standard. We need to build homes more durable to extreme weather conditions, which involves adopting strategies specific to the project’s climate. Managing upfront costs and finding ways to receive discounts on ever-rising insurance premiums for the homeowner may be the biggest challenge here.
How do you plan to incorporate what you learned at IBS into your career in building and as an NGBS verifier?
This experience gave me a large breadth of exposure to builders in different markets, with different levels of high performance building experience and attitudes towards it. As I continue my career in the construction industry, I find it to be ever more essential that us professionals understand that the burden to build energy efficient and healthy homes is on us, as opposed to the consumer. However, builders are also managing many different challenges at the same time such as labor and material shortages, price fluctuations, unplanned issues on site, along with ever-changing building codes and their varying degrees of enforcement to name a few.
As an NGBS verifier and green building consultant, we can relieve the pressure of what the builder has to know by being the go-to for these green and healthy building items. We can help the builder produce a higher-quality product for the consumer without the added stress of having to know the details of high-performance building.
Is there anything you wish you had been able to do but didn’t get a chance to?
With over 20,000 steps logged a day, I don’t think I missed much!
What advice would you give to anyone else attending IBS for the first time?
Pace yourself. This year featured 1,800 exhibitors across various conference buildings with 100,000 attendees and it is easy to forget how much you’ve walked while browsing everything until it hits you. I enjoyed taking breaks at the Huber's International Builders’ Show booth where they had speakers discussing high-performance building strategies throughout the day.
