Can Buildings be Ranked on Social Value?

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20 March 2024

A building certification that measures the social value of a building has been launched by Fitwel.

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Investors in commercial real estate can access ratings such as BREEAM, WiredScore, WELL Building Standard, NABERS and many more to help them measure the performance of potential assets. With voluntary ESG reporting commonplace and many predicting that mandatory reporting regulations will ramp up, building certification platform Fitwel is pre-empting a desire to quantify ESG better.

According to a 2022 Deloitte Survey, it’s mainly the “s” in ESG that causes the most difficulty – some may question whether you can define social performance in easy-to-analyse metrics at all. 

In collaboration with sustainability advisor EVORA Global, Fitwel has piloted such an idea with commercial real estate owners and asset managers worldwide, such as BGO, Harrison Street, Hudson Pacific Properties, Lendlease Americas, PGIM, QuadReal Property Group, and Vornado Realty Trust. 

They identified the economic value of strategies that already exist within the Fitwel Standard, selecting those that have the greatest impact on material risk and financial value, and occupant health. Social Performance by Fitwel is the result.

This includes:

• Access to water, bottle refilling stations and universally accessible bathrooms
• Percentage of occupants located within 800m of green spaces
• The ratio of breastfeeding facilities to occupants
• Access to daylight and views of nature
• The ratio of emergency first responders to Total Occupants
• The walkability of the area

"Social Performance by Fitwel is the only certification pathway applicable to all real estate assets and designed to measure and track the Social performance of real estate funds on an entity scale. Together with EVORA Global and the first cohort of pilot users, we have made it possible to clearly define the value of Social strategies, providing structured insights to inform continuous improvement for stakeholders - an industry first," said Joanna Frank, President & CEO of Fitwel.

Philippa Gill, Executive Director at EVORA Global, added: "We are delighted to be working with Fitwel on such a critical step forward for the real estate sector. Every building has been created for people, whether to live, eat, work or shop, and the new Social Performance portfolio methodology now allows investors and managers to understand and track the human and financial impact of social measures."

Picture: a photograph of an office with a desk and two chairs facing a large window. Image Credit: Unsplash

Article written by Ella Tansley | Published 20 March 2024

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