Sustainability in real estate decision-making: views from the coal face

In September, CBRE’s research team conducted a survey of over 200 UK clients to establish the ‘state of play’ on the full range of environmental and social sustainability issues which the real estate industry is being asked to tackle including climate change, biodiversity, pollution, waste, health and wellbeing, and responsible business. Respondents included investors, housebuilders, occupiers, lenders and infrastructure providers, working across the full range of real estate sectors.

We draw four main conclusions from the survey results.

Firstly, firms need to review their sustainability strategy’s real estate coverage.

好消息是，只有10％的受访者表示其组织的战略在其房地产影响中尚不清楚。但是，只有13％的受访者表示，他们在我们询问的所有九个可持续性问题的策略中都有“重大”或“一些”的覆盖范围。大多数客户与“最佳班级”覆盖范围相比存在差距 - 生物多样性是一个特殊的弱点。

这也许表明,公司应该backw工作ards from the real estate decisions they are making, to the strategy that have adopted, to ensure that real estate’s contribution is being maximised. Does a firm’s strategy give a meaningful framework for the main types of real estate decisions that it usually makes? For example, does it say what the organisation wants to achieve on water usage or ‘embodied carbon’? If not, it may be time to seek improvements to the strategy.

其次，与交易对手合作（无论是房东，租户还是银行家）将继续至关重要。尽管我们的多元化受访者有很多共同的目标，但我们发现占领者和房东之间的情感不匹配。

For example, as Figure 1 shows, occupiers placed much greater emphasis than landlords on talent retention, employee wellbeing and brand reputation as drivers of their ethical business strategies.

Figure 1: Main drivers of respondents’ commitment to sustainability goals

Source: CBRE Research

We also found that occupiers were actually more willing to pay for certain environmental improvements to buildings than landlords thought. So it’s important to check that decisions reflect the strategy of our stakeholders, not just our own strategy.

第三，我们需要完善决策系统。

我们有62％的受访者在考虑组织的可持续性目标“最多”或“全部”时做出了决定。这听起来还不错 - 但这意味着10名受访者中有近4个没有。当考虑到这些目标时，决定在决定中比超重更容易体重。

At the very least, this represents a substantial compliance risk for businesses whose follow-through from strategy to delivery is coming under increasing scrutiny from customers and regulators.

Thus, firms should be reviewing their real estate decision-making processes to ensure that decisions are taking the organisation’s own strategy into account more systematically.

Fourthly: keep it practical.

Hearteningly, our respondents did not see uncertainty about the future as a particularly big challenge in taking action now, nor were they ambivalent or passive about the importance of taking action on sustainability issues.

实际上，受访者认为的挑战更为实用，“煤炭面孔”问题没有正确的数据，某些决策的复杂性以及平衡（甚至理解）成本和收益的困难。在CBRE，我们专注于帮助解决其中一些实际挑战。

因此，总的来说，我们发现房地产行业处于正确的道路上，但是也有明确而具体的机会将我们的可持续性承诺转化为砖和迫击炮机会。