Introduction

We partner with a Major Real Estate REIT and Logistics firm with a portfolio consisting of 1000 acres of land, 42 million square feet of buildings and $72 billion’s worth of assets under management worldwide. As an environmentally conscious business, they chose to work with Eight Versa to support their commitments to sustainability and help with their ESG reporting.  

The Project

Over the years, Eight Versa has worked successfully on several of the clients projects including BREEAM assessments, Life Cycle analysis and WELL testing for a number of their buildings across the UK. More recently, the client recognised that the EU Taxonomy regulation criteria and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) are new guidelines that push the boundaries of sustainability disclosure and they wanted to align their European portfolio of assets. They were aware of the level of detail needed and the benefits of introducing these guidelines, and so we worked with their global team residing in the US to help implement these standards into their European operations. 

We worked closely with the ESG Data Project Manager to establish definitions and KPIs around the data they needed to collect so that they not only adhered to these requirements but also created real business value. This included several set data points such as:  

• Climate change mitigation  

• Climate change adaptation 

• Climate Hazard Risk assessment 

• Human Rights and Responsible Business Conduct  

• NZEB (Nearly Zero Energy Building) Requirements per country of operation 

Creating these key data points meant that the client could confidently meet requirements stipulated in the SFDR and EU Taxonomy regulation for their own European Logistics Fund. This fund’s portfolio expands across 41 markets in 12 European countries and is based on the market value of 567 properties as of September 2021. With the data, they were able to apply and leverage this to their real estate activities including new buildings construction, renovation of existing buildings and the acquisition and ownership of existing buildings. 

“We partnered with Eight Versa because of their asset level knowledge and experience of the built environment. That asset level attention to detail was key in setting them apart from bigger bulge bracket consultancies and helped define the granularity and completeness of the data we were looking for. They speak the same language we do in terms of their commitment to embedding sustainability throughout the built environment.” – ESG Data Project Manager

Next Steps

It was important not only to collect and review this data, but also to implement this process annually to monitor any progress and remain aligned to the EU Taxonomy regulation. Through our partnership we were able to identify the main sustainability focus areas to create a bespoke building assessment tool for the client that they can use for years to come. This will help the team create more transparency and credibility around their sustainability reporting, as well as create new methods to improve their environmental impacts.