ESG within the real estate industry

The topic of sustainability has experienced increasing importance in 2021 and the inclusion of ESG criteria has become a decisive factor within the strategic orientation of many companies. On 1 January 2022, the EU Taxonomy Regulation came into force. It is intended to establish binding criteria for sustainable management and thus create planning security for the transformation process of companies. In addition to the taxonomy, the European Union’s catalogue of measures also includes comprehensive reporting obligations for affected actors in the real and financial economy, which are intended to make it verifiable whether their compliance policies are in line with the regulation’s goals.

In addition to the implementation of the ESG criteria, especially those companies that are concerned by the taxonomy regulation have to implement efficient ESG reporting in their operative business to transparently communicate the company’s sustainability efforts to social and economic stakeholders.

As part of xax’s real estate industry experience exchange group our CFO, Dr Michael Piontek, spoke about the ESG-driven transformation of the real estate industry as well as the associated sustainability reporting and identified the three biggest challenges in this context:

  1. Legal hurdles in integrating photovoltaic systems or e-charging stations into the building portfolio.
  2. Implementation of digital and automated consumption measurement to determine the carbon footprint.
  3. Difficulties in the measurability of building projects regarding CO2