The Great Indoors: Why Wellness Real Estate Matters with Paul Scialla

When we’re talking about wellness, it makes sense to start the discussion where we spend most of our time: indoors. Despite how our modern society is structured, it’s important to remember that until recent history, humankind spent most of its time outside—not contained within four walls and a roof. Today humans spend roughly 90% of their time indoors and the pandemic has been a harsh reminder of how important the quality of indoor air is to our health and well-being.

The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) has been analyzing the critical role that the built environment has on global wellness for years. The 2018 GWI report, Build Well to Live Well, was the first research to size and analyze the global and regional wellness lifestyle real estate and communities market. Next, GWI issued a White Paper, Resetting the World With Wellness: Healthy Built Environments for Healthy People, describing how our unhealthy built environment can cause both chronic and infectious diseases like COVID-19, while elaborating the roles that communities, businesses and governments can play in building healthier homes and communities for healthier people. As part of the comprehensive GWI global wellness economy report issued in December 2021, the Wellness Real Estate: Looking Beyond COVID-19 report revealed that the wellness real estate sector was the #1 growth-leader both before and during the pandemic: The market grew from $148.5 billion in 2017 to $225 billion in 2019 to $275 billion in 2020 (22% annual growth). Interest and opportunities in this sector are exploding.

This week’s guest is Paul Scialla – the founder and CEO of Delos, one of the world’s premiere wellness real estate companies. We’ll hear how Paul’s passion for researching how to better the lived environment actually helped fuel a movement, meeting at the intersection of technology, real estate, sustainability, medicine, research, altruism and design. Paul will also elaborate on biophilic design – or incorporating aspects of the natural world into our indoor environments. Delos is a leader in setting standards for wellness real estate with its WELL certification, providing a people-focused approach to the built environment and complementing the building-focused LEED certification focused on environmental impact and sustainability.

After spending 18 years on Wall Street—ten of them as a partner at Goldman Sachs—Paul’s interest in sustainability and altruistic capitalism led him to found Delos and later start the International WELL Building Institute. So much of what he learned on Wall Street informs what he does now, taking an approach of mathematics and evidence to the wellness paradigm.

Delos has been merging health sciences with building sciences for over a decade, doing research that had never been done before. One example is The Well Living Lab, a collaboration between the Mayo Clinic and Delos that is the first lab exclusively committed to research, development and testing of innovations designed to improve the health and well-being of individuals in the built environment. Delos also took their hard-earned research, with over five years and over 100 million dollars of capital invested into it, and published it all for free. Today the company has projects that span every income level, from affordable housing to senior living centers to public school systems.

Join host Kim Marshall for this eye-opening episode as they discuss why Paul’s passion and curiosity have led him to become an authority in the wellness and sustainability movements, what tools Delos provides to accomplish their wellness goals, the difficulty in finding the best products in air filtration, and the possibilities of creating clean environments in your own homes.

To learn more, visit Delos’ site at Delos.com.

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Hosted by Kim Marshall.