Real estate and infrastructure investment is judged largely on financial returns, with social and environmental factors usually treated as ESG add-ons. A growing body of work argues that the way we measure value itself is a problem.
At UKREiiF 2026, a panel chaired by Thrive’s Danielle Aberg asked what would change for real estate if we measured success by gross wellbeing rather than GDP, and what that would mean for how schemes are financed, planned and delivered.
This blog summarises the discussion and pulls out what it means for asset managers, investors, fund managers and sustainability leads thinking about long-run asset performance and the next generation of impact reporting.
Alongside Danni, the panel for “GDP to GWB: What the Wellbeing Economy Means for Real Estate and Infrastructure”, featured:
- Daniel Fujiwara (Head of Economics, Thrive)
- Nicola Windsor (Head of Operations, CCR Energy)
- Sam Markey (Founder and CEO, Recurve).
In what follows, we’ll dig in to the main subjects the panellists discussed.
GDP has gone up. Wellbeing has stayed flat.
Daniel Fujiwara’s opening remarks framed the whole of the rest of the debate. Across the OECD, he explained, GDP per capita has risen significantly over the last fifty years, yet subjective wellbeing measures, life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety, have stayed roughly flat. Something in the way we generate growth is being offset by something else.
He went on to suggest a potential remedy: treating real estate as a means to an end of improved wellbeing rather than an end in itself widens the field of what should count in a business case:
- On the positive side, social cohesion, pride in place, access to green space, mental health
- On the negative side, noise, construction disruption and congestion
This is not theoretical, Daniel noted. The Green Book already requires it for major infrastructure decisions, and the principle has been applied on the A303 at Stonehenge, M60 development in Manchester, Heathrow expansion and major stadium projects, amongst others.
The measurement infrastructure is already here
The barrier to wellbeing-led investment is not data, Daniel argued:
- The ONS and other UK datasets provide millions of free-to-access data points on natural environment, physical health and mental health
- The Green Book carries standardised monetary values for both the WELLBY (the wellbeing-adjusted life year) and the QALY (the quality-adjusted life year), both already in use on Department for Transport and major housing and infrastructure schemes
In fact, he explained, the barrier is awareness and skill. Private and non-profit sector practice is significantly behind academic and public sector practice on what is actually possible with this data, and that gap is particularly visible in real estate.
The investor case: wellbeing protects asset value
Sam Markey picked up the argument, making the financial case for viewing wellbeing as an end in itself directly. The economic cost to the UK of poor wellbeing and economic inactivity runs into the hundreds of billions of pounds a year through lost productivity, employer cost and welfare spending. That cost is now a live conversation inside HM Treasury and Department of Health, he pointed out, with serious questions being asked about what kinds of investment could reduce it.
And there is real capital ready to back that thesis, Sam went on:
- The Local Government Pension Scheme has been asked to set an ambition of investing 5% of its assets in projects supporting local areas, which would unlock around £16 to £20 billion of place-based investment if achieved across the scheme
- The global impact investing market reached $1.57 trillion in 2024 according to the Global Impact Investing Network, with the UK social investment market estimated at around £106 billion.
This is becoming increasingly possible thanks to “blended capital stacks” composed of:
- Philanthropic or grant capital absorbing risk at the front
- Social investors taking modest returns
- Institutional money entering once the risk has been reduced
That structure is increasingly common in public service innovation and could equally finance social housing and other community-anchored real estate assets, Sam suggested.
Where wellbeing currently sits in investment decisions
Nevertheless, the panel was frank: in most live investment conversations, wellbeing is secondary.
Nicola Windsor framed the hierarchy in infrastructure as follows:
- Environmental impact and biodiversity
- Climate-related risk,
- Wellbeing as a knock-on effect.
CCR Energy has more scope to change this than many private investors, Nicola explained: the company benefits from being public-sector funded and operating under Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act, which gives it space to be patient and a clear ethical framework.
Daniel suggested incentives rather than mandates are most likely to move the dial: tax breaks, or payment-by-results structures where private organisations are paid a share of cashable savings their projects deliver to the Exchequer, have an important role to play.
What real estate should do tomorrow
The panel considered the practical steps that businesses and investors can take now.
Sam argued for getting specific about “what good looks like”, picking a discrete, measurable wellbeing outcome that partners genuinely care about and that is authentic to the place.
Nicola stressed the importance of purpose clarity from day one, without which baselines and improvement cannot be measured.
Daniel pushed organisations to take their own purpose statements, often broad lines about “healthier communities”, and check whether the last major scheme was actually designed and measured against that purpose, or defaulted to jobs and gross value added (GVA).
But the challenge is about more than what any organisation can do today, Daniel warned. Under GDP accounting, destruction is productive. A disruptive project that damages green space and then has to be remediated counts the remediation as economic growth. The established systems of economic valuation are incentivising negative impacts on society and counting the cost of fixing them as growth, he said.
How Thrive supports wellbeing-led real estate measurement
The wellbeing valuation methodology Daniel pioneered sits at the heart of the framework Thrive’s real estate platform uses for measurement. The Impact Evaluation Standard is independently governed, aligned with HM Treasury Green Book principles, and built on publicly accessible data from official sources such as the ONS. WELLBYs, QALYs and a wider Green Book-aligned proxy set are part of its standard metric library, which means a real estate team can quantify wellbeing impact on the same basis Treasury, Department for Transport and major public infrastructure projects already use. The Standard is updated as Green Book guidance and PPN requirements evolve, so teams using it stay current without having to track the changes themselves.
The Thrive Social Scorecard gives real estate teams credible quantification at asset and portfolio level, with international proxies covering 38 OECD countries for cross-border portfolios. Activity-level data from a single building feeds directly into asset, fund and portfolio reporting, replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets, supplier templates and ad-hoc surveys most asset managers currently rely on, so a fund manager can answer an investor question about one specific intervention or a portfolio-wide outcome from the same source. That same source supports the headline KPIs investors and boards now ask about — wellbeing impact per pound invested, WELLBYs delivered per asset, monetised social return.
For asset owners building the case that wellbeing-led design protects long-run rental yields, sale prices and tenant retention, the Scorecard makes that quantification available without commissioning a bespoke piece of analysis. For teams whose social impact reporting still leans on anecdotes and case studies, that puts a Treasury-aligned number alongside the narrative.
A credible number also changes the conversation with boards, occupiers and community partners, not only with capital allocators — and for sustainability leads building the internal case, that Treasury-grade rigour gives a board-ready answer to the question “is this evidence robust enough to bet on?” More on the Real Estate platform.
Real estate social impact teams are typically small relative to the breadth of stakeholders they need to engage. Thrive’s email-based contributor capture lets occupiers, contractors and community partners respond without a login, giving sustainability leads a single live view of what social value activity is actually happening across the asset, so a two- or three-person sustainability team can coordinate data from dozens of supply chain partners and community organisations without chasing logins or running parallel spreadsheets.
For a deeper conversation about how this works across an asset lifecycle, the team is happy to talk it through.
The wellbeing economy treats wellbeing outcomes, not GDP, as the primary measure of success. For real estate, it means valuing schemes by what they do for the health, social cohesion, employment and quality of life of the communities they serve, not just by GVA or jobs created. The methodology is supported by HM Treasury Green Book guidance and standardised monetary values for wellbeing impact.
A WELLBY (wellbeing-adjusted life year) measures change in subjective wellbeing (typically “life satisfaction”) over time. A QALY (quality-adjusted life year) measures change in physical and mental health-related quality of life. Both have standardised monetary values in the Green Book, and both can be incorporated into a business case alongside traditional economic metrics.
Wellbeing-led design, walkability, green space, air quality, food and beverage mix, has been shown to support stronger rental yields, sale prices and tenant retention. Wellbeing measurement also provides the quantified evidence base investors increasingly require to allocate capital under impact mandates. The Local Government Pension Scheme alone has been asked to direct up to 5% of its assets toward projects supporting local areas.
The UK is the international reference point. OECD case studies on wellbeing valuation disproportionately come from the UK, and other Anglophone economies (New Zealand and Australia were singled out on the panel) are catching up rather than leading. The Green Book methodology is widely treated as the international gold standard.
How can a small sustainability team measure wellbeing impact across a portfolio? Through a platform that holds commitments, evidence and outcomes in one place across the asset lifecycle, with a measurement framework that handles wellbeing quantification on a standardised basis. Thrive’s platform combines the Impact Evaluation Standard for the methodology, the Social Scorecard for asset and portfolio reporting, and email-based contributor capture for low-friction data collection from occupiers, contractors and community partners.
Alan Boyce
Senior Researcher More articles by Alan >
