Sustainability Metrics For Commercial Real Estate Assets - Establishing A Common Approach

As sustainability has become more central to property industry thinking a multitude of tools, using many different metrics have emerged, designed to measure and assess the sustainability of real estate assets and their owners and managers. This profusion in tools has been healthy in helping the industry to address sustainability in practical ways. However, it is increasingly apparent that a coherent, common set of metrics focused at asset level, needs to be established by the industry to consolidate the progress that has been made and move forward. To this end a group of UK industry bodies brought together under the Property Industry Alliance has been working with industry to establish a set of metrics that can be adopted by industry as a common approach to measuring sustainability at property asset level. To ensure compatibility with existing practice the work took a review of measures currently used as its starting point. Consultation with practitioners and a cross-industryworkshop including representatives from property companies, investors, occupiers, consultants and Government has enabled a distilled set of metrics to be produced. This paper sets out the progress that has been made, presenting findings for wider discussion and debate.