HomeThe submission period for GRESB assessments begins on April 1st. Have you gathered all the necessary information and implemented the right procedure to ensure your funds are certified?
Extra-financial criteria play an increasingly important role in the overall evaluation of real estate assets. Certifications such as GRESB testify to your funds’ commitment to ESG standards, which now play a major role in the market’s assessment of an asset’s overall value. While such certifications demonstrate your commitment, they require a great deal of preparation to achieve the highest possible rating. By following an approach that ensures team coordination and feedback, the certification process is accelerated and the assessment outcome improved. The GRESB submission process is undoubtedly demanding. In this article, we explain how Deepki supports real estate players throughout the process, through a combination of its SaaS platform and ESG expertise.
What is GRESB?
The GRESB certification is one of the best ways to guarantee the preservation of your assets’ value by highlighting your extra-financial performance. The GRESB is a private organization that provides a methodology for evaluating the ESG performance of financial funds. This assessment requires the submission of a form covering a wide range of ESG criteria: entity and reporting characteristics, management, policy and disclosure, risks and opportunities, environmental management systems, performance indicators, building certifications, stakeholder commitments, new construction and major renovations. Once this form is submitted, the institution itself assigns a score of up to 100 and ranks the funds from 1 to 5 stars, with 5 being the maximum score. Since its creation in 2009, the GRESB has been a standard certification for investors who use it as an assessment tool for their investments.
Given the variety and number of criteria used in the assessment, the coordination of stakeholders can be particularly challenging during the GRESB application process.
How can you make your GRESB submission more efficient?
As with most processes, the GRESB submission can be time-consuming and demanding, as there is an enormous amount of information to collect from various sources, and there is a large number of stakeholders involved. Multiple ESG criteria are taken into account during the GRESB evaluation. An exhaustive list of criteria and sub-criteria are available in our article Real Estate: enhance your extra-financial performance with GRESB !
Essentially, your funds will need to provide environmental, social and governance information from several stakeholders for assets in different regions. You also need to ask your asset managers to use the same naming system to collect and share information, so that you can then use the data collected. Finally, an internal or external figure, such as an auditor, will centralize the required elements to complete and submit the form to the GRESB.
Therefore, in order to save resources and time, it is essential to take advantage of a comprehensive tool designed to complete the GRESB form.
Deepki Ready: a centralized, collaborative ESG platform
Data is key to correctly responding to the GRESB assessment. It is important to be able to collect, aggregate and exploit your data as quickly as possible in order to gain efficiency.
By automating your data collection, Deepki accelerates the recovery and centralization phases, and uses this information to fill in your GRESB questionnaire in an entirely or partly automated manner. By taking advantage of a single tool to collect the data and to complete the submission form, it becomes easy for you and your stakeholders to follow the progress of the questionnaire. Additionally, all users of the platform can instantly identify unanswered questions. Finally, Deepki Ready offers the possibility of exporting your form directly in the format required by the GRESB so that it can be submitted rapidly and with limited editing, reducing the risk of potential errors due to re-typing.
The GRESB panel in Deepki Ready
Once the fund has been rated, you will find your detailed results in the dedicated GRESB panel within the platform and on your “fund sheets”, making it easier to visualize your performance and giving you the tools required for the long-term management of your funds. While it is important for your investors and end-clients to understand the opportunities for improvement at asset-level, it is equally important for them to know their overall performance at all times via reports including, among many other things, their GRESB rating. Ultimately, the historical information will allow you to track the evolution of your ESG rating and progress in the future. Deepki Ready is therefore your companion for improving the extra-financial performance of your assets and, as a direct consequence, their financial value.
With Deepki Ready, give your teams the opportunity to collaborate across a single platform that centralizes all the data of your funds and assets. This will optimize and streamline your certification process and give you the best chance of achieving the highest possible GRESB score.
