GRESB releases its 2017 Global Real Estate results

GRESB has released its 2017 Global Real Estate results and the story for this year is one of continuous improvement both in performance and industry adoption.

The Real Estate sector has maintained its momentum, despite the post-COP 21 US political landscape, with 850 participants in this year’s survey, an increase of 12%. The average GRESB scores have also increased globally, but there is still room for improvement in environmental performance.

One area where improvement seems to have slowed is with Performance Indicators. We believe this could be because of a lack of coverage of buildings that are not directly-managed by landlords yet where GRESB requires the data. Participants are trying to resolve this by increasing the focus on tenant-engagement, especially in the UK. It is interesting to note that there are now twice as many participants in Asia as there are in Australia, showing the increasing prominence of this region in sustainability benchmarking.

Like-for-like improvements are beginning to slow down somewhat, with a 1% reduction in like-for-like energy this year. It is unclear whether this is driven by the saturation of early adopters in the survey who have already made significant gains, an increase in latecomers with poorer performance, or whether it just a one-off blip. Either way, there looks to be a decoupling of energy use and carbon emissions because of grid decarbonisation. For instance flat lining, or slightly increasing energy use in Europe and Australasia, both regions have seen significant reductions in carbon emissions.

The GRESB survey has always been driven by investor needs. This year GRESB surveyed its investor members, together responsible for $17 trillion of institutional capital. This led to possibly the most interesting finding, which is that 94% of those surveyed said that they use GRESB data as part of the investment process. Whilst investors are currently most interested in transparency of ESG performance, 34% said that they now set specific targets related to GRESB performance. This means the data is becoming relevant to the key end user in this process.

With this in mind, we at Verco are very proud to have helped support our clients achieve 13 Green Stars.

Paul Stepan, Head of Policy, Strategy & Compliance at Verco, will be joining a panel to discuss these results at the 2017 GRESB Real Estate Results Launch on Wednesday 13th September. For more information on the event, click here