Parker White: Unety’s Integration with Perl Street is Transforming Sustainable Finance
Finding funding for small sustainability projects shouldn’t feel like an impossible task. Yet for many contractors and property owners, that’s exactly what it is. Today’s sustainable finance operations are riddled with inefficiencies and nowhere is this more apparent than in small and mid-sized sustainability projects. These smaller projects–ones that could meaningfully reduce emissions and cut energy costs–often go unrealized due to high costs and limited access to capital.
Parker White knows this story well.
White’s name carries weight in the world of sustainable finance. His career spans roles at industry leaders like JLL and Google and his tenure at Hannon Armstrong, the world’s first climate-positive investment firm. “I've been in this game for 17 years across the commercial real estate and sustainability space,” he notes, highlighting his extensive experience.
With a career spent untangling inefficiencies in finance, real estate, and sustainability, White understands both the challenges and opportunities in financing smaller sustainability projects. He’s heard it across the industry, from contractors trying to navigate complex financing systems to small business owners whose visions for sustainability end at the word “unaffordable.” With this knowledge, White founded Unety–a platform built to take the guesswork (and difficulty) out of funding sustainability projects.
The Early Years: From Sustainable Finance to Entrepreneurship
White’s career began halfway around the world–in China. “I launched JLL's clean energy services practice in China. It was the industry's first sustainability practice in commercial real estate in China,” he says. The role pushed him into uncharted territory, where he developed the country’s first green lease in 2007 and navigated the challenges of an emerging market.
Because of his success in APAC, JLL relocated Parker to New York City to take on a global role in scaling energy practices by leveraging financing solutions. This new remit would eventually lead him to Hannon Armstrong, who gave him a front-row seat to the mechanics of sustainable finance. “I properly started the sustainable finance chapter of my career with the world's first publicly traded company exclusively dedicated to carbon reduction assets,” White recalls.
There, he worked with entities like the Connecticut Green Bank to bring sustainable financing to commercial real estate. It was the kind of work that opened doors for large-scale projects but left smaller properties behind.
These early experiences revealed something critical. Financing structures weren’t built for small-scale players. They were optimized for the few who could navigate the system, not the many who needed support.
The Creation of Unety
A restaurant wants to add solar panels to its roof. A car wash needs funding to switch to high-efficiency equipment. These projects don’t make headlines, but they add up. “Small properties represent 50% of all the commercial real estate globally,” White points out. “The vast majority of small properties are owned by mom-and-pops, not Vornados and Simon Properties, not institutional owners.” White saw the immense potential of these projects but also understood that the existing system wasn’t designed to fund them.
Unety was created with one goal: to empower contractors and property owners to access funding for sustainable projects. It focuses on the practical essentials—underwriting, capital sourcing, and financial alignment—delivered in an accessible way for those on the ground doing the work.
Bankability refers to assessing whether a project meets the criteria to secure financing across a broad spectrum of lenders and financial instruments. As Parker emphasizes, bankability is not determined for an "audience of one" but instead reflects the project's viability across seven financial instruments and 13 diverse capital providers. Using just a property address as input, the Unety platform pulls data from proprietary, public, and subscribed sources to evaluate property title, environmental factors, financial details, and property owner creditworthiness. This data is rigorously synthesized and analyzed through 67 underwriting criteria, designed using investment banking expertise, and calibrated against publicly traded securities.
Validated by national lenders, this process achieves a 98% success rate in finding capital for projects classified as bankable. The result is a detailed investment memo accessible to audiences with varying levels of financial acumen, presenting a clear and actionable picture of the project's financial viability and alignment with lender appetites and specific financial instruments.
The impact has been substantial. “In six months, we had identified hundreds of projects around the country,” White shares. By reducing the complexity and cost of project origination, Unety has opened doors for smaller sustainability initiatives, making them viable candidates for capital and enabling real change at scale.
Challenges in Sustainable Finance
Developers build projects. Capital providers design financing solutions. Rarely do these two worlds align perfectly. “The biggest gap is the disconnect between those who are out there doing the project work, building the projects, designing the solutions; and the capital–those who are designing the capital and the capital solutions,” White explains. This disconnect leads to inefficiencies that disproportionately impact smaller projects.
Smaller properties feel this disconnect the most. Mom-and-pop-owned shops make up nearly half of all commercial real estate globally. Yet, they’re largely absent from the sustainability conversation. High transaction costs, a lack of expertise, and financing structures designed for larger players leave them out.
Without scalable solutions, the same cycle repeats. Small projects remain too risky for most investors and owners with big ideas are left watching from the sidelines.
The First Eco-Bankability Score
Automation is at the heart of Unety’s success. The Eco-Bankability Score revolutionizes project underwriting, providing contractors with precise, data-driven insights. It’s simple: a contractor with a wrench isn’t an underwriter. But with the right tool, they can provide the necessary information to move projects forward. “The Eco-Bankability Score is a proxy for the decision that an underwriter makes to guide a funding decision and ascribe an interest rate to that funding decision,” White explains, “so rather than having a series of back and forths with the capital provider, you're showing up with a project that's fully baked, where you've already removed all the hair.”
This efficiency extends beyond underwriting. It’s about precision. Unety’s platform enables developers to match projects with suitable capital providers quickly. “Unety helps you approach the right capital providers because you've got different financiers and different capital providers who have different investment theses, who have different risk appetites.”
For capital providers, the risks are clear. For contractors, the path is straightforward. Projects close faster and at lower costs, creating a flywheel effect that accelerates sustainability across markets.
The Perl Street Acquisition
Unety is now part of Perl Street's Origination platform, and together they’re addressing a fundamental issue in sustainable finance: origination. While many loan management solutions focus on streamlining existing processes, they often neglect the challenge of initiating projects, particularly at the intersection of sustainability, real estate, and finance. This is where Unety and Perl Street align perfectly.
Perl Street brings deep expertise in project development, acting as a critical connector between diverse parties—developers, capital providers, and other stakeholders—to create projects that might otherwise never materialize. The collaboration between Unety’s cutting-edge automation and Perl Street’s facilitation expertise connects traditionally siloed areas, enabling efficient, scalable solutions for small and mid-sized sustainability projects.
The acquisition originated from a shared vision and mutual respect for the challenges at this unique convergence. “The intersection of sustainability, real estate, and finance—those are three different languages. And it’s really rare to meet a polyglot,” White says. Reflecting on his initial conversations with Perl Street CEO and Co-Founder Tooraj Arvajeh, he adds, “When I could have a conversation across these three topics, understanding how they interact, I knew I had met an individual that I would be staying in touch with for a long time.”
The synergy is already producing results. Unety’s Eco-Bankability Score provides contractors with actionable insights to prepare fully vetted projects, while Perl Street helps navigate the nuanced interactions between developers and capital providers. By combining automation and expertise, the partnership not only simplifies sustainable finance but also ensures that it reaches underserved markets—unlocking opportunities for small property owners and contractors to make impactful upgrades.
“There’s so much inefficiency at the intersection of disciplines and domains, and that’s causing bottlenecks,” White explains. “Unety technology automates that, and Perl Street expertise and services facilitate it.”
Scaling Unety’s Vision
For White, scaling Unety is not just about expanding the company—it’s about creating a sustainable model that can be replicated across various industries and markets. “When I launched Unety, my focus was retrofitting small commercial buildings, so we were talking about projects that were around $500,000 to a million dollars,” he explains. These projects are too small to attract institutional investors but too big for property owners to self-finance. White identified this as a crucial gap in the market.
The Eco-Bankability Score, a central feature of Unety’s platform, enables rapid and reliable project assessment, making smaller projects more accessible to institutional investors. “Ultimately, all that's being driven by the Eco-Bankability Score,” White says. The score enables developers to quickly assess a project’s financial viability, unlocking access to capital and ensuring that smaller projects can be scaled effectively.
This ability to scale has profound implications for the future of sustainable finance. As Unety grows, its impact expands beyond individual projects, creating a system where sustainable upgrades are no longer reserved for the largest corporations. “We’re focused on retrofitting small commercial buildings—projects in the $500,000 to $1 million range—because that’s where the need is greatest and where the market has failed to deliver solutions,” White says. This approach allows Unety to target a significant portion of the market, giving small property owners the tools they need to make impactful sustainability upgrades.
A Vision for the Future of Sustainable Finance
Automation continues to push sustainable finance forward. It’s not just underwriting; it’s the entire system—origination, alignment, evaluation—every step refined.
But the future of green finance goes beyond just automating processes. White sees a future where sustainable finance is an integrated, seamless part of the real estate ecosystem. “Being a project developer is about being a connector, right? It's about bringing otherwise disparate parties together and jointly creating a project where there otherwise would be none,” White says, adding, “To do that, you have to bring distinct disciplines together and bridge their gaps in understanding.” This collaborative approach is the foundation for Unety’s ongoing success and scalability.
As Unety continues to evolve, White sees additional opportunities to leverage technology to reduce inefficiencies. The future will be driven by data and precision, with tools like the Eco-Bankability Score allowing projects to be assessed and scaled with greater ease. “Unety helps you approach the right capital providers because you've got different financiers and different capital providers who have different investment theses, who have different risk appetites,” White explains. This data-driven approach ensures that capital is deployed where it will have the greatest impact, making the process more efficient and more accessible.
Conclusion
Parker White’s work isn’t just about visions or missions—it’s about creating tools. Tools that simplify, connect, and deliver: the Eco-Bankability Score, a partnership with Perl Street, and a platform built to tackle the real-world challenges of small projects with big ambitions.
Sustainable financing no longer has to leave the mom-and-pops out. For developers and contractors, Unety isn’t just a platform. It’s a way forward.
For more about Unety’s impact, visit Unety.io.