Chris Draper has come up with an easy way for developers to get points toward LEED certification for their buildings ­— by leasing a small patch of woodland from a person they’ve never met, for two years.

It’s all done on a website (sorry, no app yet), and it’s about as easy as buying something on eBay. (LEED is a program that certifies “green” buildings.)

Draper gets $600 a credit for processing. The landowner makes maybe $950 per acre per year just for agreeing to leave a woodland unplowed. The developer gets one step closer to a LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. 

That environmental gold star used to seem like going the extra mile but now is basically demanded by customers. 

The leases involve units of a 10th of an acre, which the developer can reserve by clicking one or more blocks on a website. And when the two-year lease required by LEED is up, the landowner can turn around and lease that land again. 

Draper’s company, Green Financial Exchange, or GFEX, offers to match developers and landowners at land.gfx.org.

“You bid on the land online,” Draper said. “If you are approved, the contract goes out immediately via email. It’s a three-minute deal.”

Eventually, Draper said, he’ll probably be making matches for landowners selling credits to offset pollution such as nitrate or greenhouse gases tied to climate change. 

But for now, “LEED lets people farm, and rich people in New York and California are paying for those credits,” Draper said.

At this point, Draper is working with one landowner near Clarinda in southwest Iowa — Seth Watkins of Pinhook Farms. Watkins has a cattle operation along with forest. 

As environmental credits catch on, Draper expects the value of the leases to rise. He wants to make sure there is a balance between things like offsetting carbon footprints and the need to grow food. 

“We are an agricultural state,” he said. “We can’t just have hipsters saying, ‘This is what we need’ ” and risk taking too much land from production.

The market has to figure out what the environmental benefits are worth to society, Draper said. “How much is it worth to save Gray’s Lake?”

“This is a free-market way to encourage tree-planting,” he said. “Now we are putting our money where our mouth is.” 

There is another way landowners could benefit from preserving, say, a hickory forest near Clarinda, Draper said. “We may want to add ecotourism later,” he said. 

“We need a public response for buying into solutions,” he added. “That is what we are doing.” 

“A farm’s real value is in the land-based assets,” he said. “We are the first platform to discover what the full value is.”

Draper said he was working on a building project and needed some LEED points when he found the section that awards points toward certification for leasing a land area equivalent to the building footprint for two years. 

The message for landowners is this, Draper said: “We can actually make money for doing the right thing.”