How Green Is Your Property Portfolio? The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark

The real estate sector accounts for more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and thus offers great potential for carbon abatement. Energy efficient and green buildings are rapidly transforming the commercial property sector, and institutional investors can benefit from that transformation through the value created by the greening of their real estate holdings. This article develops a global survey for property portfolios, measuring the environmental performance of listed property companies and private property funds. Based on the objective set of environmental survey data, we construct an environmental scorecard – the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. The results reported in this article suggest that the environmental performance of the global property investment industry can be substantially improved. For institutional investors, the survey results and the scorecard metrics benchmark the current environmental performance of their property portfolio, and show the way to improving it.