Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa September 2014 | Page 18

COVER STORY

• Treat sustainability as an integral part of business
processes along with the traditional decision-making
factors and parameters, rather than as an add-on or
separate category.
• Build structures for corporate sustainability
management. Treat this as an overall quality
assurance tool and mechanism.
• Whenever property services are outsourced, create a
framework of requirements (that have to be applied
at all corporate levels) for type, extent, format
and frequency of data/information exchange with
third-party service providers. Amend the contractual
arrangements with these counterparts accordingly.
• Challenge your advisors to provide holistic advice.
• Set targets for portfolio level performance and monitor
their compliance.
• Produce meaningful sustainability reports.
• Consider that performance at the building and
portfolio level might impact not only on corporate
reputation and leadership profile, but also on
employee costs, productivity, promotional and
marketing costs, etc. Therefore, undertake efforts
to capture the value of property level sustainability
investment at the company level.
• Support the adoption of building documentations
(building files, building passports) within the industry.
• As a large organisation, use your influence to set and
enforce industry conventions, cooperate with initiatives
like UNEP FI, UN Global Compact (GC), the Principles
for Responsible Investment (PRI), and endorse existing
standards such as those of the Global Reporting
Initiative.

within the portfolio. Then add consumption values and
CO2-emissions. Information on comfort levels and user
satisfaction is vital.
• Exploit synergies when collecting and processing
building-related information.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONS:
SINGLE BUILDING LEVEL

• Set sustainability performance targets and measure
progress within individual assets business plans.
• Extend facility management processes by adopting
energy consumption monitoring, operating cost
controlling, post-occupancy evaluations in combination
with complaint management, and tenant satisfaction
surveys.
• Make sustainability a requirement for new and
refurbishment projects.
• Actively request building-related information and
documentation. Treat its absence as a potential dealbreaker.
• Ensure that building documentations (building files/
passports) are issued within project development and
refurbishment projects and that these are continuously
updated during the management phase.
• Exploit the full potential of green leases.
• Actively communicate the sustainability credentials
of individual buildings/projects towards third parties
such as banks and insurance companies.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONS:
PORTFOLIO LEVEL

• Integrate sustainability considerations into portfolio
management and adopt a three-dimensional approach
to portfolio analysis whereby financial success factors
are depicted in relation to the quality characteristi