A review of recent sustainability reports suggests that real estate owners have entered a more mature phase of decarbonization. Large REITs and institutional landlords are beginning to move beyond portfolio-wide climate targets toward asset-level decarbonization planning, compliance modeling and capital planning.

“Many REITs and large owners have already set high-level goals,” wrote David Maguire, global head of product for sustainability solutions at the commercial real estate services and investments firm CBRE, in an email. “Now they’re moving into implementation, integrating decarbonization targets with capex planning at the asset level.”

New use cases

Investor expectations, occupier goals, disclosure requirements and green financing frameworks are helping push planning down to individual buildings, as metering technologies and building management software (BMS) grow more sophisticated. And owners are finding new ways to manage and analyze these larger and higher-quality data streams to drive action at the building level.

“The business case for each intervention is tied not just to risk management and protecting asset worth, but also to increasing net operating income and exit value,” Maguire said.

GRESB — the sustainability consultancy with a foundation that sets standards for evaluating and benchmarking real-asset performance and a corporation that administers the assessments — has also observed movement toward granularity. 

“Previously, managers drew their targets at the portfolio level and worked on implementing them asset by asset,” said Victor Fonseca, senior associate for real estate at GRESB. “Now we’re seeing demand from investors for this to be done bottom-up.”

The decarbonization plan for each asset should include an emissions-reduction strategy, time-bound milestones and financial grounding, he added. 

In 2020, with investors calling for more granularity, GRESB began collecting data at the asset level, rather than just the portfolio level. And in 2024 it began scoring asset-level data.

Investor demand, then regulation

Although regulation reinforces the push for asset-level data, the demand for deeper detail often starts elsewhere.

“Regulation is typically one step behind industry leaders,” said Fonseca. “Institutional investors d