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Thoughts
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EVORA
Earlier this month, we had the pleasure of hosting our first breakfast event in our newly expanded London office. Speakers included our own Oli Pye, Jo Smallwood from M&G Real Estate, Richard Hamilton-Grey from TH Real Estate and Roxana Isaiu of GRESB. A lively two hours of presentation and discussion followed. Many points and some great examples were raised. Here are some of the headlines.
Health and wellbeing – a roadmap approach
Health, wellbeing and resilience in particular needs to be defined at organisational level. Oli presented a structured road map approach – recommending that real estate organisations map boundaries, consider materiality, manage risk and opportunities and monitor performance, before feeding back through a continual improvement loop. Assessing materiality is key to reducing the long list of possible impacts into a short list of material issues, taking account of the key business risks and opportunities as well as stakeholder expectations.
It was notable that both Oli and Jo highlighted the need for health and safety to be recognised as a key component of the broader health and wellbeing agenda, with the former being more the protection of value and the latter creating value. Oli recommended the use of existing certification standards such as FITWEL to provide content and guidance to your approach rather than trying to create an approach from scratch. In the same way, Oli highlighted existing resources which had been developed to identify political, climatic and natural hazards around the world.
Systematic and tiered approach to health and wellbeing
Jo presented M&G’s approach to health and wellbeing, talked about the systematic and tiered approach M&G take and the target to reach 10 million people with their health, wellbeing and inclusivity programmes by 2025. This was underpinned by their three pillars of health and wellbeing;
- Training and Awareness for the property managers to deliver enhanced support and customer service;
- Information and Services, providing information on building accessibility and facilities – great examples Jo gave were changing accessible toilet signage in shopping centres (not all disabilities are visible) and the use of apps for tenant engagement;
- Physical Environment to positively affect customers’ experience, with a good example being the introduction of shared electric vehicles at residential developments.
Resilience to protect and grow long term value
Richard took the audience through TH Real Estate’s approach to resilience to protect and grow long term value through evaluating cycles, understanding megatrends and focusing on cities. As well as the consideration of political, societal and technological megatrends, Richard highlighted the importance of resilience at the asset level to protect exit yield from specific areas such as future regulatory risk, climatic impact, reputational risk and potential obsolescence.
He also explained the importance of TCFD – the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures to provide the governance and transparency of reporting on climatic impacts for an organisation such as TH Real Estate.
GRESB real estate assessment
Finally, last-but-not least, Roxana discussed changes to GRESB. Happily for most of us, there are no major changes planned for 2019! She discussed the importance of buildings being healthy, resilient and efficient if they are to be sustainable and the requirement for GRESB to include these key elements into the survey. Health and wellbeing has been a separate module in GRESB for the last three years and in 2019 it will be fully integrated into the real estate assessment. Roxana discussed key learnings over the last three years, which included that investors care about health and wellbeing, that it has the ability to differentiate buildings and create value, and importantly that unlike environmental impact change that is driven by the capital providers, health and wellbeing is driven by the tenants and employees.
So, in conclusion, organisations should identify and define health and wellbeing and resilience strategies at the top level and establish systematic approaches to manage them (with continual improvement being a key element), as well as implementing controls and improvements at asset level to deliver on strategy promises.
