UKREiiF 2025: What the Industry Is Really Talking About

The Conversations That Actually Mattered at UKREiiF

From heat strategies for vulnerable occupiers to the carbon concrete gap, here is what real estate’s most pressing sustainability conversations looked like on the ground in Leeds.

One of the things that makes UKREiiF different is the sheer breadth of people in the room. Investors, asset managers, local authorities, developers, and sustainability professionals all colliding across three days of panels, coffee queues, and candid side conversations. That diversity produces something no single-sector conference can replicate: a genuine cross-section of where the industry’s head is at. This year, several themes emerged repeatedly — some familiar, some sharper and more urgent than before.

1. Risk Management and the Insurance Equation

The perennial question of insurance cost kept surfacing throughout the week. For asset owners actively managing physical climate risk at the individual asset level, there is a growing belief — and some emerging evidence — that demonstrable risk mitigation should translate into lower premiums. The industry conversation is moving beyond “we should do something” toward “how do we prove what we’ve done?” Quantifying risk reduction in a language that insurers can price is the next frontier, and one where the data and analytical tools now exist to make a meaningful case.

2. Physical climate risk → CapEx Budgeting

One of the clearer shifts in conversation this year was around physical climate risk. Most asset managers have moved past the identification stage – risk scores and high-level assessments are largely understood. The question now is what it actually costs to address a specific risk at a specific location. Even indicative remediation costs per square metre, broken down by hazard type and geography, would be genuinely useful for capital expenditure planning. There is real appetite for something that connects a risk assessment to a number a finance team can work with.

3. Heat Strategies for Vulnerable Occupiers: Now, Not Later

As the UK enters another early summer heatwave, conversations about thermal comfort in the built environment have moved from policy discussion to operational reality. This is particularly acute across sectors EVORA knows well — housing, healthcare, and care homes — where the wellbeing of vulnerable occupiers is directly tied to asset conditions. Holding an asset that becomes genuinely unpleasant, or worse, unsafe during extreme heat events is not simply a welfare issue: it shapes occupier preferences, retention, and long-term asset value. Proactive heat strategies are no longer a nice-to-have.

“What can we do in five or seven years to genuinely enhance the value of this asset? And at the same time, how do we take a long-term view for assets likely to sit in an index fund indefinitely?” — Asset manager, overheard at UKREiiF 2025.

4. Quantifying Social Value — From Abstract to Actionable

Identifying the broad social value that real estate schemes bring to local communities has long been one of the industry’s more frustrating conversations — instinctively important, but notoriously hard to pin down with numbers. That is beginning to change. Increasingly robust methodologies now allow asset managers working alongside local authorities and communities to put meaningful figures on social impact. As this quantification matures, it should unlock better dialogue, better decision-making, and — critically — better outcomes for the communities that schemes are meant to serve.

Regulatory & Market Signals

5. EPC Uncertainty and the Cost-Per-Point Question

Regulatory uncertainty around energy performance requirements is creating a challenging planning environment. With EPC thresholds expected to tighten over the coming years — and real questions about how a future government might approach net zero commitments — asset managers are understandably cautious. The practical question heard most at UKREiiF: what does it actually cost, per EPC rating point gained, to make retrofit improvements worthwhile on brown assets? It is exactly the kind of granular, evidence-based analysis that makes the difference between a sound capital allocation decision and a speculative one.

Key Figures

6. Industrial Assets, Data Centres, and the Local Energy Grid Opportunity

One of the more forward-looking conversations at UKREiiF concerned industrial real estate’s role in the emerging energy landscape. The viability of pairing industrial assets with data centres to create localised, multi-asset energy grids was discussed with genuine enthusiasm. This represents a meaningful shift in how the sector thinks about value creation: not the single-asset lens that has dominated real estate investment, but a systemic view where adjacent assets collectively meet the energy demands of a changing economy. It also opens interesting questions about who owns, operates, and benefits from such infrastructure.

7. The Carbon Concrete Gap: Still the Grey Elephant

No honest sustainability conversation at a real estate conference can avoid concrete. With approximately 8% of global CO₂ emissions attributable to its production, the construction industry’s continued dependence on conventional concrete represents one of the most significant structural barriers to credible net zero pathways. Low-emission concrete alternatives exist but have not yet achieved the cost-competitiveness or supply-chain scale needed for mainstream adoption. Until they do, the gap between industry ambition and material reality remains stubbornly wide. This was acknowledged at UKREiiF, but solutions remained elusive — which is itself a useful signal about where focused innovation effort is most needed.

EVORA’s View

What strikes us about these conversations is how much the industry has moved from awareness to action — and how urgently the analytical tools now need to keep pace. Asset managers are asking sharper, more specific questions: not “should we retrofit?” but “what is the payback per EPC point on this particular asset class?” Not “does social value matter?” but “how do we quantify it in a way that survives scrutiny?”

That shift is where EVORA sits. Our work across ESG strategy, energy performance, biodiversity, and data and technology is designed precisely to translate these urgent industry questions into evidence-based, commercially grounded answers. UKREiiF reminded us why that work matters — and how much more there is still to do.

Whether you’re navigating EPC compliance, developing a heat strategy for vulnerable occupiers, or exploring the opportunity in multi-asset energy infrastructure, we would be glad to talk.