What Price Sustainability?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), far from being a recent phenomenon, has a long history. However it has grown from the individually inspired philanthropy of the Cadburys, Titus Salt and Robert Gordon, for example, to become part of the corporate offer addressing all the stakeholders in a company. Behaving sustainably is an integral part of CSR and most property companies have some kind of environmental statement that describes their commitment to the green agenda. These are set in the context of an industry that sees sustainability as essentially a cost item, since the benefits of investment accrue mainly to occupiers rather than landlords. This paper seeks to measure the impact upon the performance of listed U.K property companies of their CSR policies and environmental statements using their adjusted share price as a performance measure. CSR policies and environmental statements are scored using incidence analysis within their annual reports in the public domain to establish the weight placed upon CSR issues in this formal documentation. The CSR index generated, together with other firm-level control variables, is set against a price index adjusted for market movements to determine whether the quality of CRS has any impact on property companiesí performance and whether shareholders are willing to pay price premium for the high quality of CRS proxied by self- constructed CSR index.