A week prior to the PROVADA, Savills noted in our City Special Sustainability that commercial real estate, specifically office space, is increasingly tailored towards sustainability. We want to go back to the office, but only if that office is sustainable. How was this reflected at the largest real estate conference in the Netherlands?
We expected ESG and sustainability as a broader theme to be the hot topics of PROVADA. This turned out to be true; the conferences’ Square of the Future was dappled with start-ups offering ESG services such as measuring the value of circular assets, installing and maintaining smart meters to save on water, or mobile trees that take up a fraction of the weight of an ordinary tree of the same size. The same focus was found in the new hires at every stand; Savills introduced me as their new head of ESG, but I was not the only one. Especially financial institutions are attracting their own ESG expertise; I had a fantastic conversation with PATRIZIA’s new ESG consultant. Another great meeting was with the Head of Sustainability at BouwInvest, who is heading up a new team specifically tailored to the requirements of the new Sustainable Financial Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), and NSI spoke about the business case for the highest timber structure in the Netherlands. The market for green bonds has grown exponentially. Financial institutions and governments vet an asset’s ESG performance prior to acquisition or renovation. At one of the many afternoon events I was told that PROVADA had become “a little too ESG-minded”.
Even so, I was missing concrete handholds to achieve the Paris Agreements’ goals. Business cases and best practices were shared in panels, but what about the bulk of offices that’s not an ESG flagship project, but still needs to become futureproof for its users and its owners? In other words; once we’re done cherry-picking, how do we upgrade the rest?
