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Introduction
This paper presents the findings of an initiative established by a group of UK-based property sector organisations with the aim of bringing greater clarity to the reporting of sustainability performance by establishing a common framework for measuring and reporting sustainability for property assets. The property industry has found the measurement of sustainability performance of buildings challenging since it began to grapple with this issue in the early 2000s. Some sectors of the industry have made greater advances than others. The construction side of the industry, particularly through constructing excellence, has been notably successful in developing environmental key performance indicators to monitor the management of waste, water, energy, transport, pollution and biodiversity within construction projects. Such initiatives are further supported by environmental benchmarking tools, such as BREEAM and LEED which have become established means of assessing sustainability in new build projects.
The demand side of the industry - the owners, investors and occupiers - has been less successful at developing a coherent package of measures. That is not to say they have not been active. A substantial number and range of benchmarking tools and toolkits have been produced over the last ten years. A relatively quick trawl through the internet produces 30 plus different sustainability benchmarking tools and toolkits for commercial real estate, many of which target property occupiers and owners. Numerous property companies and investors also measure sustainability within their real estate portfolios for their own purposes including for internal reporting, annual report and accounts, marketing and investor relations.
With so many tools and reports available it would be reasonable to expect that the industry is becoming rich with data enabling us to understand how sustainable is the existing stock. However, this is profoundly not the case. Recent work commissioned by the Investment Property Forum ([7] IPF, 2009) to develop a sustainable property investment index found the greatest hurdle in completing the work to be the lack of available building-level data. It was notable in that work that there were examples of property investment funds keen to participate in the project but simply unable to because they could not make the required data available. It is also worth noting that the required data were relatively high level and non-technical.
Whilst the proliferation of...