Savills : The role of high-quality real estate data in an ESG strategy

High quality sustainability data is the foundation of a successful real estate ESG strategy. The actual value around data does not come from simply capturing it or its quantity, but only from its quality - how good is your data, and how do you use it?

With regards to ESG, collating accurate utility data (energy, water and waste) for a building is key to reducing its environmental impact. Half-hourly consumption data, granular data on each part of a site, verification of utility data from suppliers, and a well set-up building management system facilitate reduction target setting, quick identification and resolution of issues, and underpin future planning for climate and energy market changes.

Knowing exactly how much energy and water a site is consuming, how much waste is being produced, thoroughly understanding how people interact with a building, and ensuring regulated, verified data, allows the selection of appropriate measures to drive ESG improvements.

There is also increasing demand from occupiers and the public to know that the spaces they use and occupy are being managed sustainably. Employee demands are changing in a post-Covid world and include greater care about where they work and the managed spaces around them.

Optimising and verifying usage is increasingly important in the current volatile energy markets. Identifying high-energy use buildings, which need investment in energy saving initiatives, contributes to a successful and targeted approach to a Net Zero Carbon strategy.

High quality data for each part of a building aids in creating an accurate emission baseline, monitoring the ongoing energy performance and its improvements, and reporting under new legislation, such as ESOS Phase 3, SECR, and NABERS.

Visualisation of data is also an important tool to help drive forward an ESG strategy. Data visualisation enables us to recognise emerging trends and respond rapidly and accordingly. Representing data as diagrams and graphs makes it digestible, real, easier for us to identify strongly correlated parameters, and puts it into the broader context of an asset.

Allowing stakeholders to see their energy and water consumption, waste production, and CO₂ emissions in graphs and charts can help improve buy-in compared to when they can only access large inaccessible datasets.

Benchmarking your utility data allows you to gain an independent perspective about how well your portfolio is performing compared with other companies, other buildings, and industry-recognised benchmarks for best practice such as REEB. Benchmarking can help to enable a mindset and culture of continuous improvement and helps to establish performance expectations.

The climate crisis has also caused increased demand from investors for resilient ESG strategies based on high quality utility data. These goals can be achieved in part by the concept of turning a building into a 'smart space'. Managing utilities intelligently involves moving away from storing data in Excel to provide auditability, automation, and accessibility.

Demystified utility data with simplified, built-in regular reports at meter, site and portfolio level with insightful key performance indicators improves stakeholder engagement, decision making, project tracking and payback.

Further information

Contact Hannah Messham or Sylvain Thouzeau

Unlocking the value of building data effectively