Sustainability, GRESB & Reporting: What’s New for 2025 for CRE Owners and Operators

Hi. Welcome commercial real estate colleagues. Today's webinar is about sustainability, GRESB, and reporting. We'll cover what's new in twenty twenty five for all of you commercial real estate owners and operators. And, of course, our webinar is brought to you by KingsleySurveys, a Grace Hill product. If we haven't met yet, my name is Jen Tindall. I am the VP of strategic insights here at Grace Hill, and I am honored to have Brenna Walraven, executive strategic advisor for real RE Tech Advisors, excuse me, here with me today. She is actually on the phone. So she is going to be speaking via the phone call, that that we have here. So, Brenna, could you please walk us through everything that we're going to cover on today's agenda? You bet. Jen, thanks so much for the opportunity to be here, with everyone at Grace Hill, KingsleySurveys, and all of you joining. We're making it through technical difficulties because we have resilience. So our topics for today is we're gonna talk about kind of market context for sustainability, and why there's a growing need for transparency. We're gonna provide some clearer definitions around sustainability terms and acronyms. We're gonna also touch on kind of the components for an effective sustainability strategy as well as the benefits for participation in and changes to GRESB. Lastly, we're gonna cover engagement pathways and resources, and, again, excited to be with you today. Perfect. Well, tell the audience more about you, Brenna, for anyone who who hasn't met you yet. Will do. So the main point that I would like to share with everybody is that my background is in institutional real estate, and sustainability. Throughout my real estate career, I always use sustainability as one more tool in the toolbox to eke out incrementally better risk adjusted returns. And so this business case focus, is what I'm gonna bring, today's webinar as well as to the work we do with our clients. And if you go to the next slide, I just really wanted to quickly touch on, who Retech Advisors is. It's a data driven sustainability advisory firm, working primarily in the intersection of real estate data and technology. And we have deep expertise in strategic program development and design as well as advisory services and, of course, support, Greg Schmidtle. So I would just touch on if it hasn't been mentioned already. You'll get these slides at the end. So sit back, relax, think about questions you might have, and we'll cover those at the end. Perfect. Yes. Come up with your questions. We love answering them. And, honestly, you've got Brenna on the phone. She is such an expert in all things ESG, sustainability, and really just portfolio and asset management. So use her while you have her. Sure. But first item up on the agenda is market context for sustainability. So I'd love it, Brenna, if you could walk us through through that topic. Yeah. Let's move to, let's jump right into the kind of the big megatrends for real estate and things for us all to just kinda have as our backdrop for our discussion today is the impacts of physical and transition risk associated with climate change. So on this Earth Day, we'll first touch on the physical impacts of climate change, which I think most of us are familiar with either directly or indirectly. Those are things like, you know, major storms, drought, fires, and the like. And really, a a major trend for us is how do we deal with those physical risks, but there are also opportunities associated. But on the transition risk side, it's everything from technology to efficiency and lighting and how we're managing, the technology in our buildings, and of around the performance of those buildings. Increasingly, that means not just data, but quality data and how we're using that data to provide decision useful information for the work that we do. The tech revolution, I think we're all aware there of that major transition with AI, automation, and Internet of things, and where well, historically, energy demand has been fairly stable for the last thirty, forty years. We're seeing ten x demand increases projected in the next, three to five years. So that has implications for real estate as well. And where that falls out is on those kind of five buckets on the right, which is we're gonna see increasing legislative change, which I'll touch on here today. We're seeing both tenant demand and investor pressure around these topics. Technology has a huge opportunity to help us, not only in optimizing our our properties and our portfolios, but even helping in our decision making, methodologies. So all of these have financial impacts, and these are big mega trends that sit as a backdrop for what's happening today with reporting and transparency. And so if we move to that next slide, we'll talk about why are investors caring so much about this topic. And what we're seeing increasing with our clients and then broadly throughout the real estate industry is that investors aren't just asking, but even requiring greater transparency, about not only the activities that are going on in terms of policy and process, but also about performance and how buildings are performing relative, to set standards, benchmarks, which is what we're gonna cover today when we talk about GRESB. We're certainly seeing increased regulatory pressure, which I'll talk about on the next slide. So I'll move to not only that we need to be more transparent, but the how do we be more transparent. And that's that alphabet soup you see there under growth pressures. So SASB well, SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, under the new administration won't have disclosures around tied to climate risks and opportunities. That doesn't mean it's gone forever, but at least for the time being. SASB, the sustainability well, I just lost my train of thought on the SASB acronym. So apologies there. It's been a little bit of a start this morning. All good. Sustainable. It's like being fluent in three letter acronyms, TLAs, as I used to say. There's so many of them. There's so many of them. But I'll move to the task force on climate related financial disclosures has now merged with the International Financial Reporting Standards. We have GRESB, which we'll talk about today, UNPRI. These are the how in where you're gonna be disclosing that information to your investors and to the public abroad in some instances. The latest is, types of nature, which is a task force on nature related financial disclosures and also the task force on inequality and social related disclosures financial disclosure. So if we you know, if you haven't had your mouthful of acronyms and you clearly haven't been keeping track with all the sustainability stuff, but we're gonna demystify it here. But this is another signal of how and why investors are focusing on this, which is the last bullet around demographics. And so more people are caring about these topics, mainly because they're seeing storms and the effects of climate change, and the effects that this can have, on their communities. And particularly if you're younger, you really care about these things. And we know that commercial real estate is driven by demographics. And accordingly, this is why investors care, right, about these topics. So if we move to the next slide, let's talk a little bit about this move from voluntary to mandatory as it relates to, again, not just what are you doing, but how you're doing and improving performance. So if you look at the graphic, don't try to read it. I'm gonna tell you about it. On the upper right corner of this slide, it's a bar chart. The, blue bar, portions of the bar are voluntary public policy disclosures tied to sustainability, and the yellow is mandatory. The point here is these public policy interventions around sustainability are just dramatically growing over the last twenty years, and we expect that to continue. Secondly, if you go to the upper left corner, you're gonna see a map, and that's from the Institute of Market Transformation that tracks the public policies associated with benchmarking your typically, your energy performance and disclosing it typically once a year in Energy Star's portfolio manager to the jurisdiction. There are sixty of those in place today, including multiple states, which you can see. But there are also another twenty jurisdictions that require audits or tune ups or even retrofits. If we move to the bottom right corner, you're gonna see another map by IMT. This one's around building performance standards, and a building performance standard is where, an entity wants our our jurisdiction wants you to hit a target, usually tied to energy use intensity or emissions use intensity. So take total energy divided by square footage. That's an energy use intensity metric. Why are these important? There are twenty of excuse me, fifteen of those in place today, but we could have another total of forty online for these building performance standards within the next twelve to twenty four months. Why is that important to understand? Well, the example we like to give is if you were in Washington, DC and you did not hit your benchmarking disclosure requirement, thirty days, hundred dollars a day, your your worst day would be a three thousand dollar fine. Bad, but not the end of the world. For building performance standards, on your worst day, if you don't hit that target, your fine in Washington, DC could be seven point five million dollars. So order of magnitude dramatically different and really has to have us all paying attention, not just investors, but us as real estate practitioners. Last two points that I wanna make on this slide is on the bottom left. You see the California state flag. This is the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act or the CCDAA. Because as I said on the last slide, if you didn't have a hundred acronyms in sustainability, you wouldn't be having a good time. What is this, legislation about? Well, this came out in twenty twenty four, and this legislation requires that firms over a half a billion, in enterprise value or revenue, and that's to be defined later. So hold on to your half to that. But you must disclose your climate related, risks and opportunities in alignment with the task force on climate related financial disclosures. It's a lot. But, essentially, what the state is saying, you're gonna have to tell us about how you're managing climate risk. Oh, and if you're a larger company of a billion or more, you're gonna have to share your scope one and scope two emissions. The big point about this is the fines can be fifty thousand dollars to a half a million dollars. So they're not something you can just say, yeah, I'm not gonna mess with that. You have to be prepared. The other key point is force other states are actually designing using the same acronyms to keep it easy for us, CCDA legislation in New York, in Illinois, in New Jersey, and Colorado. So another big trend that we're seeing. The last point on this slide is really around, the sustainable finance disclosure regulation which comes out of the EU. And you may be asking yourself, Brenna, don't you know we're not in Europe today? I do. But if your firm or your joint venture partners or investors are getting capital out of the euro out of Europe, then they are going to need you to align with this d s FDR regulation, which is if you're the main point, and there's a lot in it, but the main point that I wanted to make to you all is you have to choose as a fund or an investor. And it may not be you. It may be your investor partner or JV partner that says I'm either going to be an article six, which means I don't have sustainability thesis in my investment, for my portfolio or for my company, which is to say likely uninvestable. It could be an article nine, which is more like an impact fund, which means all affordable housing or all net zero buildings, super hard, not as many feet folks in that bucket. Most are ending up in article eight, which means you have to in integrate environmental or social characteristics into the way you operate, your fund or your portfolio and then report on those regularly. This is just a signal about all the different ways we're increasingly gonna have to be more transparent, again, not just about activities, but actually actions and performance that we're taking. Mouthful, but let's move to the next slide. So on the next slide, I really think it's important. There's a lot again, another acronym, heavy, logo infested slide, but the big key point here is that there is increasing alignment around the International Financial Reporting Standards or IFRS, which is at the center of this slide. So GRESB, aligns with IFRS. TCFD merged with ISERS, SASB, PRI, GRE, they all are tying around, IFRS. So if you're not familiar, it's just something to be aware of. I think the key here is it's where TCFD had four pillars of strategy, governance, risk management, metrics and targets, and had four l eleven elements to align around that. IFRS has a hundred and twenty. So it's just an order of magnitude, more things to be aware of. But don't worry about that yet. It's it's slow moving, but it's coming your way soon. Last slide in our context, if we move to the next slide, is really just to reinforce what are the material elements that can drive value, in a real estate portfolio. I think there's often a lot of focus on the accretive value drivers. So things like, hey. If I get more efficient, I can lower my operating expenses. Certainly, that's an an accretive value add. Hey. If if I have a green certification or I'm operating as a high performance building, there's a potential for rent premiums. We've definitely seen that. All of which can lead to higher net operating income and value creation. But I also wanna touch on the defensive value protectors. So I just touched on one on the last slide, which is regulatory compliance risk. We've actually had clients say, hey. This building has a building performance requirement. It's gonna be really expensive. We're just gonna sell it. And when they started talking to their usual buyers, those buyers all said, hey. I know that property is in a building performance, jurisdiction. We know there's gonna need to have a lot of capital, so you're gonna take a haircut for us to get our arms around it. Well, that's something that we can mitigate, manage, using sustainability as one more tool. Also, things like climate risk, which we talked on, even insurance premium risk. We're increasingly seeing that there's an opportunity to use good management, around climate, resilience, risk as a way to lower your insurance costs. The point here is that sustainability can be a material impact to driving value, but also protecting value. So with that, let's move to the next slide. Perfect. Thank you for that, Brenna. And here, I wanna switch gears a little bit because if anyone has kept up with the news lately, I'm sure that they've seen ESG in it a lot. And the definitions for sustainability and ESG are certainly changing as a result. So, Bernadette, could you talk us through and and just give us clear definitions of what sustainability and ESG mean today? Absolutely. And I you're absolutely right. It's coming up a lot. And so on this slide that you see here, we have environmental, social, and corporate governance are all makeups a part of sustainability. I not only wanna just touch on the activity, but most importantly, I wanna again draw your eyes to the concept, that we see happening every day for our clients. And in my, you know, thirty plus years in real estate is that these efforts can have, a potential impact on the financial performance of an asset and portfolio. So let's touch on a couple. So on environmental, I think we know what the activity would be. We're gonna have resource management and pollution prevention. We're going to try to work on efficiency and improve performance because that will, reduce our potential reporting and disclosure risk and compliance risks. The the financial benefit there, though, is if we can lower operating costs, we can again improve at net operating income and asset value, but we also can reduce the risk of those regulatory and and related compliance fines, and related. So there is a direct correlation there to a financial impact. Corporate governance, I think most people know what that is, and that usually comes down around policy and process and having board accountability. And if you're publicly held, having shareholder rights. But, ultimately, if you think about it from financial performance standpoint, this is really around aligning interests between investors or shareholders and the management of the company. And, really, the goal is to avoid, you know, financial surprises or blow ups or black swans as they're often referred to. And we do this because there's policy process and alignment of interest to reduce those risks. So huge financial benefit and often one of the most important things investors look for. Lastly, on social, lot to cover here. I really just wanted to touch on two key things. One is if we think about diversity and inclusion, which I know is a lot of headlines, for a lot of different reasons. But, really, when you think about it, it's really about having diversity of thought and to improve decision making. And so we know that if we have diverse perspectives, we're ultimately gonna likely make, better decisions, and that's actually been proven in study after study. The point for today's, discussion is that when you think about social, what we really want you to think about is engagement. So that's engagement with your employees, That's engagement with your tenants or residents. That's engagement with your investors and ultimately with, engagement with the communities in which you live, work, and play. So it's a broader definition, and these impacts not only, again, affect the environment and affect well-being and certainly reduce risk, but they also have potential financial benefits for an asset as well as a company and portfolio. Perfect. Thank you so much for that, Brenna. And this is such a helpful snapshot and definition. If any of you are speaking about ESG within your organization, I highly recommend whenever we send these slides out out after the call that you save this down and you use this to guide your conversations because as Brenna said, it's ESG is about a lot more than what we have stereotyped it to be over the last decade or so. So thank you again for for preparing this, Bernat. And I did wanna switch gears a little bit because now we know now we know what the ESG components are. How do we build a strategy around all of these things? I mean, this is a lot to cover. So can you give us best practices on ESG strategies? Oh, absolutely. And I think the good news is these are fundamentally things that make sense, again, not only for the environment and for our communities, but also for the for the bottom line. Because we know as real estate investors, owners, and operators that our core function is really to add value, create value. But we also need to do that in a way where we're reducing risk. So, again, if we look at the key components for an effective strategy, first and foremost, it's understanding the goals of the organization. And sometimes that's not just the organization, but it's also for each individual asset. What's the business plan or goals of that asset? Or what's the the goals, and motivations for a fund if the port if the asset or portfolio is part of a fund? Know what those goals are. And then you wanna map the material risks and opportunities. So I laid out what some of those would be, a couple slides ago. So use that as a guide is, hey. Can it help me, increase rent? Can it help me lower operating expense? Oh, can it help me meet compliance obligations? Those are big material risks and opportunities that we need to map out, and then build a plan around that. We do a plan for just about everything we do. We do have a plan when we buy an asset or portfolio. We have a business plan for that. We have a plan for our budget or capital, plan for a property each year, typically. Same kind of thing here. You wanna have a plan for what are the three goals or five goals I wanna accomplish over the next twelve to twenty four months. And then you need to engage with that plan around internal stakeholders first and then ultimately likely external stakeholders, most notably like your investors. What do they think about your plans and goals? In my experience, if you do those, four steps, your investors are gonna lean in. You're gonna get people on your team and leadership leaning and say, okay. We have a good path forward. It makes sense both, again, from a sustainability perspective, but also from a financial perspective. But lastly, on this slide, I just wanna connect the dots. So if we get more efficient and we reduce, our use of of energy and reduce waste, that's going to not only save us on our op eds, but it's gonna also make the property more competitive. We also know that when you better control, you know, the use of resources like energy, for example, you often get better performing asset, which means you're better able to control temperatures. All of those lead to more satisfied happy tenants, and residents. And when you're able to do that, your retention is better, which means less downtime for releasing, which means increased revenue, but with also the benefit of lower operating costs, all of which drive higher net operating income, and that's what drives value. The higher the NOI, the better the asset value. And while you're doing those things, you're doing so with less overall risk. So they are connected. We just have to think about them that way and have a plan to get there. Got it. Thank you. That was helpful too. And I I gotta bring it back to that alphabet soup that we were talking about earlier because we covered so many different organizations and their reporting around sustainability. But one in particular, GRESB I know you do a lot of work with clients on. So could you talk a little bit more about the benefits of GRESB and how GRESB fits into your overall sustainability strategies? Yeah. Excellent. Thanks for teeing that up. Is GRESB, if we move into the outside just to show you a little bit quickly on the growth of GRESB, and there's a reason for that. Because investors are seeing that there's an opportunity to get better insights, again, not just on policy and process, but actual performance of portfolios or investment vehicles that they're investing in. In fact, we've had a client. It was interesting. I was talking to a pension adviser that works with a lot of different vehicles. They were showing me how they were using GRESB to identify, investment managers that they would want to invest with on behalf of these pensions. And I saw a new client on the noninvestible list. They weren't showing me that for that. They were just showing me how they were using GRESB, and it was a stunning reminder that you may not know you're not on the list. But being aware of how you can, not only report to, but improve GRESB could be the make or break of a new investor or the growth with your existing investor base. And just is why you're seeing almost a threefold increase in a little over a decade within GRESB. If we move to the next slide, I just quickly wanna touch on, the different types of, assessments that Grows has. So you'll see in the circle that there is a standing investments assessments, and that's based on two components, performance and management, heavily weighted on performance. Performance includes things like energy, water, waste, greenhouse gas data, certifications, tenant engagement efforts, and surveys, things of that nature. The management component is more about process. Do you have a policy? What is your process, in engaging for your employees? Things of that nature. Those combine to do the standing investments. But I also wanted to make sure people are aware on the next slide, you'll see that there's also a development, assessment and benchmark. And that's, again, heavily weighted on the development aspects of performance. So same management questions as the prior, standing investments. But for development, they're gonna ask you about your development policies and processes. Are you pursuing certification? Are you looking at a body carbon? Do you consider biodiversity? All those kinds of things come up within GRESB. But if we move to the next slide, I really wanna just briefly kinda walk you through what GRESB is and is not. So GRESB is a relative sustainability benchmark. So if you think about what's relative versus nonrelative in this example, well, if you thought about Energy Star as a certification at an asset level, you know that if you got to a certain energy use intensity and efficiency level, so on a score of one to one hundred, we're scoring a seventy five or above. You'd know that you were eligible and you'd hit that standard and you'd be able to get an energy star certification. GRESB does not that. GRESB just saying, how do you perform relative to your peers of other peers of other portfolios? So it's portfolio level, and it's relative. So let's talk about, a couple things. One is that your peers historically were picked by GRESB and increasingly now will be picked by you as the submitter to GRESB. So for example, you can pick based on geographic region, which is generally what happens. You wanna pick by property type. So if you're all multifamily or all office, you'd wanna be grouped with those or could be diversified if you have more than one property type and then compared with listed and nonlisted. The nuance to that is there's more categories now. You could be you can select, I wanna be compared to US based office portfolios privately held that have a core strategy or a value add strategy. So it's getting much more nuanced so that you're benchmarking to what you as the submitter would think are your peers. The key thing here is you can't just say you do stuff. You actually have to provide evidence. So you have to provide actual data. You have to actually provide evidence for things like what's your climate resilience program. You can't just check a box and say yes. You actually have to give them information and evidence that you have a program in place. The key here is that this benchmark will also change over time. So just when you think you've got it nailed, the questions will change, and then we'll continue to evolve. If you go to the next slide, what's changing in GRASP is, super important to kinda keep our eyes on. One is the energy efficient scoring methodology, which is definitely, you know, a little bit of a black box. It's their proprietary means of how they're evaluating buildings, is going to acknowledge that there are top super efficient or low energy use intensity buildings that should get more scoring than just improving this year versus last year. So it's gonna be more focused on getting to really low energy use intensity or, emissions use intensity, those topics, to max out scoring. There's a new, specific scoring around residential this year, and I think this is a trend, that will happen more, which is let's just take, for example, that residential portfolios are are a little different. So for example, there's a question in GRESB that asked you, do you have a tenant improvement guide? Well, for residential, that's really not how it would work. So GRESB is kind of looking and acknowledging that there are nuances. And for this year, it'll be voluntary that you will get the second report or scoring, tied to being a residential portfolio. And and that definition is if if more than seventy five percent of your gross asset value is in multifamily, you'll get opted into this residential scoring based on the stuff that you already submit to. So watch for that. DEI, has has been changed to human capital. I'll just quickly note that that's a trend we're seeing as clients are moving from ESG to sustainability. They're moving from DEI to human capital, engagement, engagement, inclusive talent, some of those names. Back to the uncored topics that are new, there's gonna be more, around renewable energy. There's gonna be more on a body carbon, and there's gonna be more on, biodiversity. And and like is typical with GRESB, they'll test drive it. They'll give you that question without scoring, and then it'll get scored in future years. So in coming years, you're gonna see more on certification. This sector specificity, which is the residential topic that I was mentioning, decarbonization for sure, embodied carbon, biodiversity, and physical climate risk, as well as, I guess, we would call it human capital, but the DEI topic prioritized. Last point is they're gonna reevaluate every green building certification to make sure should they get full points, partial points, or should they not get recognized by GRESB at all. It won't take effect this year or next year, but it'll take effect in twenty twenty seven. So I wanted to get a signal on that. And so if we move to the next slide, you'll just get a a quick summary on scoring. You'll get this slide after, so I don't wanna belabor the point. But it's you can see where GRAS is gonna emphasize, climate, risks and opportunities. It's gonna emphasize net zero. But it is gonna still emphasize human capital. So that's where we're gonna see the shifting. With that, if you just move to the next slide, really, why should we care? Right? I know this feels a little overwhelming, a lot going on, a lot of acronyms. But the reason we should care is because increasingly, the investors in the marketplace do. And we don't expect that to change given some of the public policy changes that we've been talking about, regulatory front, etcetera. So this is just something to keep it in the back of our mind of why this is important is because of increasing we're gonna get asked about it. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of logos on this slide, and a lot of people care about ESG still. So I did want to talk just quickly about engagement pathways. So could you spend just a few minutes talking about how users are engaging with res data? Yeah. This is great. I I think I've mentioned the one client, who was kind of off the list. They are now firmly on the list, which is great to see. But I wanted to first briefly touch about the survey, that was here. Is it impossible to read? I just really wanted to make a point that GRESB did a survey a couple years ago, and they were serving their investor members of Grevs, not really the submitters, but those that are paid members that wanna see this data and look at it. And seventy five percent of those, investor members, you reported that they actively engage with their managers to request participation in Gres. And a full third of those investor members said that they require GRESB participation, which we got. It's kind of interesting, and that's a trend that we are seeing increasingly required participation in GRESB. And two thirds of the surveyed investor members use GRESB results and benchmarks, again, as an engagement tool, and fifty percent say they use the data that comes out of GRESB, for their own, portfolio analysis. So it's just saying GRESB two-thirds is getting used more and more and how they're gonna engage with their investor partners and managers, will increasingly be using the data points. Why are why did your score go down? Why aren't you improving in performance categories, etcetera? The last point before I turn it back over to you, Jenna, is just to say that internal stakeholders and external stakeholders both benefit from face to face connection. We learned that in COVID, that, boy, do we wanna get together, and see people and connect on a human level. But it's also super important to understand that we also need to have objective measurement tools and follow-up mechanisms to really understand feedback and input that we're getting from our clients and customers. That's right. Yes. I couldn't agree more on the importance of data. And as many of you who have seen me present before are probably not surprised that I had to show some data at some point in this webinar. So you can see right here, this is pulled from our KingsleySurveys tenant satisfaction data over the last two years. And what we are helping you to do is to figure out what sustainability areas to prioritize and emphasize based off of not only what your tenants want. As you can see, we have quadrants here for high priority. So these are the items that tenants are saying they really wanna see in their properties as it relates to sustainability. And then we have two other two of these quadrants identified as high cost and low cost. So you can see that tenants really want recycling, energy efficiency, and water efficiency, and water's on the line, but definitely recycling and energy efficiency. These are low cost, high priority areas as it relates to sustainability. So I highly recommend you guys do your own tenant survey. This is aggregated data across all of KingsleySurveys. So it is useful from a directional standpoint, but this will differ depending on your specific property in terms of what tenants are prioritizing for sustainability. But just giving you giving you some direction and guidance as to what to focus on. And, again, as Brenna mentioned, tenants who are more satisfied with their sustainability initiatives are also more likely to renew. So this can have huge dollar impacts on your properties and your portfolio. And with that, just wanted to remind you all quickly that GRESB does require a report. A document shows that surveys were completed by a third party, that they show the response rate, and that they include metrics for key questions like overall satisfaction and net net promoter score. Surprise, surprise. KingsleySurveys does that for you all. So we'll talk a little bit more about Grace Hill and KingsleySurveys later, and we have several announcements that I cannot wait to share with you guys. I have been, like, sitting on my hands, for this as well. But before we get to that oh, excuse me. I was skipping ahead to q and a. So let me quickly talk about KingsleySurveys, if you're not familiar with us and what all we offer. So we offer tenant satisfaction surveys, as you probably intuited by our call so far. You may not realize that we also offer resident satisfaction surveys, as well as client and investor surveys and employee engagement surveys. So for that human capital category, survey? We cover so many survey? We cover so many things as you can see the categories here, and folks use our surveys not just for sustainability. Really, they're they're looking at space needs. They wanna know if their tenants are going to want more space or less space or the same amount of space, and are they planning on renewing? These are very helpful leading indicators that can, again, save you money in the long runs that you can plan ahead to backfill or, hopefully, if your tenant says that they're not intending to renew, you can look at their feedback in the areas that maybe they're not as happy with and see if you can make adjustments come renewal time. So some of those areas might be with the amenities. It could be janitorial or maintenance related. It could be related to property features, or as we've talked about a lot on the call today, sustainability initiatives. One reason that many of you all sign up for KingsleySurveys tenant satisfaction surveys is the Kingsley Index. This is the most comprehensive commercial real estate benchmark in all of North America, and it's because we cover so many different property types from office to industrial to retail and medical office and life sciences. The benchmark is also across multiple different property classes and geographies, So we actually customize the benchmark specific to you, to where you're located and your different property classes as well as the property type. Again, another reason that folks will come to KingsleySurveys for their tenant satisfaction survey needs. And not only that, we're using the most recent data. So we're only looking at information over the last twenty four months, which, again, helps you make decisions that are impactful in the moment. Alright. And now we're getting to q and a. So if any of you have any questions for Brenna, please drop them in the chat or for me. I'm happy to answer questions too, and I will get to them. Alright. Looks like we had a couple come in already. So let me pull them up. Alright. Brenna, where is GRESB going in the future? So what does the future look like? Yeah. Great question. I touched on a little bit, but I think it's important to emphasize there is going to absolutely be, an increased focus on performance. So not only is the scoring seventy percent tied to performance in the standing investment, but actual performance on asset by asset basis, are you having, you know, really high performance, super efficient buildings with respect to energy in particular, but also with water as well as having a good program for managing waste? We're gonna see more of that, and they're gonna be, you know, kinda haves and have nots in terms of scoring types that. I also think the rigor around certifications is gonna be, more important. So they're used to recognize, in house certification programs that has gone by the wayside. And some of the most rigorous certifications will get full credit, and other certifications will get less than full credit, and some will just go away altogether. Lastly, I think there's gonna be a huge consider, focus on things tied to climate and decarbonization. So as I talked about climate resilience scoring, the value for that is going up. We're gonna see more of that and more scrutiny on the evidence associated with those programs. So just doing a climate risk assessment won't get you there. You're gonna have to have a, wait for it, pass force for for climate related financial disclosures alignment or the international financial standards, board record alignment with those frameworks that we touched on. So you're gonna see more of that, including biodiversity and embodied carbon. So that's the big trend of where we're seeing things move is better performance, sector specific, certifications getting reevaluated, and DCAR being a heavily, focused part of it. Perfect. Thank you. And as a former accountant and still have my CPA, I'm very familiar with Cyphers. So I don't know how many of you are on the call are as well. But, definitely, that's something that I was like, oh, I know what that is. Alright. Another question here, something I'm very interested in too. Given the current geopolitical environment, what are you seeing with ESG and sustainability? Yeah. Another great question. So I think, obviously, there's been a lot in the in the press, over the last several months. A lot of executive orders coming out of the new administration. But I think here's the key thing that we're seeing from our clients and more broadly in the industry is that we may change what we call things or the vernacular may change, but the work really is continuing. So what do I mean by that? So we may not call ourselves the the head of ESG. We're now the head of sustainability. But we still have a head of sustainability, and we're still doing a lot of stuff around sustainability. So we're increasingly seeing folks not wanting to be, you know, kind of at the ire of a, you know, an outrage or a Facebook post or anything along those lines. They're really just saying, as fiduciaries, we have an obligation to run our properties and portfolios in a way that saves money, reduces risk. And so ergo, especially given the compliance requirements, investor demands, we have to do these things. We just may call them different things. I think the last thing that I would, say is a lot of the stuff that we've seen in terms of, attacks from on climate and things of that nature aren't really changing the fundamental. And I'll give you an example. So there's been a focus on, you know, attacking renewables and things of that nature. But under the inflate inflow excuse me, inflation reduction act or IRA, there are, availability of bunnies associated with getting to renewables and electrical vehicles and those things. And because those are legislatively based, an executive order cannot change those. I think grants may be in question, but everything else should move forward if they're in a legislative, body or excuse me, a legislative front of how they were implemented. So the good news is vernacular is changing, the work continues, and we're, again, just seeing a continued progression because as fiduciaries, our clients consistently say we need to do these things to, again, drive the business case proposition that sustainability provides. Perfect. Thank you for that. We actually had a really great follow on question in the general chat from. And she said, Brenna, you touched on this earlier, but given the political and economic volatility, do you feel that investors and owners will still be focusing and financing sustainability initiatives? So talking about it a little bit more from the investor and owner lens. Yeah. Great great follow-up question. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And and, again, as a fiduciary, there's an obligation. And the easiest way to kind of think about it is the compliance topics that we talked about, and how those are kinda popping up everywhere. You can't just say I'm not gonna deal with building performance standards and start paying seven and a half million dollar fines. Right? So our clients are actually thinking about these things not only during their whole period, but even when they're acquiring an asset. They're actually looking at who is the buyer of this asset? Will they be able to buy this asset if we don't make certain investments, not just again on policy and process, but actually investing in the asset? And we're seeing major institutional investors say we have to do that because it provides liquidity and exit and our ability to to sell. So it has to make sense. Right? Like, there still has to be a financial benefit. ROIs can be hard in certain situations. It's easy if I take out a forty watt bulb and I put in a ten watt bulb, and I calculate the run time for that bulb and the average price of energy, and I could tell you what the return on investment for that because I can calculate the savings and what the costs are and calculate that. It's harder for other things. But even green building certifications, there there's increasingly data that shows that tenants, residents, those appeal because those are a standard that gives them comfort that the building is not only green or sustainable, but also healthier and safer. And we're seeing that play out in terms of value and in terms of investor interest and willing to fund or invest in those types of activities. So great question. We are seeing it. Still has to be thoughtful, still has to make sense. But if it's absolutely gonna add value, reduce risk, deal with the compliance requirement, investors are increasingly saying yes. Wonderful. Thank you, Brenna. Alright. Last question that we have here. And feel free to drop any others in the chat if you guys have any, either to me or in the general chat. How important is engagement in today's environment? Lots of questions asking about today's today's environment. Yeah. No. I I just think this is super it's always been important, but I think it's more important than ever because we need to have conversations about what's important with our investors, what's important for our tenants and residents, and make every effort to align around those, efforts, wherever possible. To me, it's fundamentally first and foremost about good service. We all want good service. We want responsiveness. And some of that is, again, tied to sustainability, but some of it is just common sense. But I also think we need to measure and track that performance over time. So what I mean by that is and I think you did a great job laying out some of the great work that Kingsley does. And I I do wanna make a, you know, an unabashed pitch that I've worked with, Kingsley throughout my real estate career and really found the insights and reporting super helpful in understanding, you know, where are tenants focusing on, what's important to them, what things can we do to improve that. And I think that's gonna be increasingly important, not only with tenants and residents, but I think with employees because the competition for talent is gonna be increasingly important. And, again, back to my social bucket, this is all about engagement. But I also think investors. Here, we're gonna have in person conversations at meetings or investor conferences, of course. But surveying and actually getting objective data about what they think is important and where to focus, I think, will be increasingly valuable. So I think these tools and techniques are, not just face to face, but having reporting and year over year benchmarking of your results. I think the benchmarking is a huge part of the value proposition that Kingsley brings. And I think we just need to think about those things in the context of not just a GRESB scoring, which it does benefit GRESB scoring as we touched on, but also how it helps us, do our business better. And I think your slides on that were fantastic, Jen. And so when we're preparing for this, I'd love to see that there's that analysis going on of, hey. Where does this what's a high priority low cost, or what's a high priority high cost, and where should we be investing and spending to keep those tenants happy? Absolutely. Thank you, Brenna. You're doing my job for me. This is fantastic. I love it. Yes. Yes. Alright. Well, we have just a few announcements. Feel free to drop any questions in the chat. We'll be sure to address them before we close. But with the last five minutes here, let me walk through some of those. So if you haven't seen our press release this morning, we have a brand new KingsleySurveys partner program. This is for our multifamily and tenant engagement, experience and satisfaction survey. So the how how does this work? How does the KingsleySurveys Partner Program work? Well, we survey over seven point three million residents and about two and a quarter billion commercial square feet per year. Now as a result of these surveys, we will tell you guys, hey. Here are the things you're doing really well, and here are the areas, well, you need to go improve. Right? So your tenants are not as happy about these particular areas. And today, we have action planning we can help you with, but pretty much we just say go figure it out and try to see if you can increase your tenant satisfaction scores. Now with our new partner program, we can actually point you to best in class vendors for specific survey question categories that can help you improve those areas of opportunity. So very excited about this new program and wanted to give you just a quick overview of what's in it for you. Right? Well, I've been on the real estate vendor purchasing side, and they're actually wrote a post about it a a while ago because there's so many options. It's exhausting to try to choose which vendor among a plethora of vendors. So what we've done is we haven't identified that single best in class vendor for you. We've eliminated the guesswork. And the idea is that if you work with these vendors to improve those survey question categories, your tenant satisfaction scores will increase. That is the hope of the program. We will monitor this over time to make sure that that's the case, and then we will obviously adjust as needed. But we are very confident based off of our our vetting of these vendors. And last but not least, there are exclusive partner perks. So for the vendors that I'll show you here in a minute, be sure to reach out to them and ask them what perks they offer for KingsleySurveys or Grace Hill having referred you. So here are our founding partners. Again, this is a brand new program. We have four founding partners, but this is going to grow. I'm telling you, we've got a whole bunch right now on the hopper for the tenant satisfaction survey, a lot more than multifamily, actually. But for the founding partners, the one that serves the tenant satisfaction survey is Minnow, and I am beyond excited to tell you about Minnow because they solve the number one request by tenants, and that is more food options. And Minnow does that by providing what are essentially like Amazon package delivery off package delivery lockers at your property. So it helps you have those Uber Eats or those DoorDash or whatever it may be, delivery so much smoother so that your tenants can enjoy whatever food that they want to enjoy. We also partnered with Zark, Gatewise, and Fetch on the multifamily side. So feel free to DM, ask us about the partner program if you have any questions, and, again, we are very much expecting that to grow. Alright. Our Grace Hill Performance Summit is coming up October thirteenth through the sixteenth. Get out those phones, scan that QR code, register now because prices do go up after the end of May. It's five hundred and forty nine dollars right now. It's located in Fort Worth, Texas. This is our annual performance summit. We are relaunching it. The last time we did it was before COVID, so I've actually never been. I am so excited. Well, what do you get out of it? You get to network with other Grace Hill customers, learn about best practices and what they're doing, and we will have special tracks throughout the session talking about our different products and new announcements related to those products or best use cases for those products. So can't wait to see you there. Scan that QR code now real quick before I'm about to switch the slides. Alright. And if you join today's webinar, which obviously most of you all here did for any of the those who are on the recording, sorry to say you're not entered. But for those of you who are here, you did get entered to win a ten thousand dollar prize, which is a communications coaching session with the incredible Sue Geier. Sue is actually our communications coach for Grace Hill, so I can personally say she is fantastic. I always meet with her before I'm presenting anything because she helps hone my presentation and makes me so much better. So I'm very excited for you all to have the opportunity to work with Sue. Winners will be announced or a winner will be announced, later this summer. So keep joining more webinars to get entered more times to win this incredible prize. Alright. And we have our next customer update webinar. So if you haven't attended these, this is where we talk about updates to our products and what all is coming soon. So if you join the last one, you would have seen that we talked about the KingsleySurveys partner program and gave a dropped a few hints. Our next one is July twenty ninth at two PM eastern. Hope you kept your phone out because there's a lot of QR codes on these slides. So you can log in there and sign up for that webinar. We will also be at a few events. These listed here are a bit more on the multifamily side, but I will be at AIM if anyone will be at AIM. Our commercial team will also be at BOMA in the IMN ESG summit coming up later in the summer, so this is only through June. So those are those are actually in July. Alright. Thank you all for attending. Hope you kept the phone out. This is the last QR code. I promise we would love it if you would leave us a review. So keep that phone out. Leave Grace Hill review. Just give us your honest feedback. We want to hear it. It's very important to us to know what you're thinking of your experience. So appreciate all of you giving the feedback. Thank you so much for doing that, and thank you again for attending today's webinar. Brenna, really appreciated all of the incredible insights that you provided today. So thank you for being here with us. Thank you, Jen, and thanks to Grace Hill and Kingsley for all the work you do and adding all the value. It was really a pleasure. Thanks again. Thank you. Bye bye now. Bye, Brenna.