What’s Behind Your Numbers? Real Estate is Serious About Social Impact, says Cleo Folkes

Real estate investors say they will accept lower returns to deliver social impact, but only when they can trust the data behind it.

Research for EPRA by Maastricht University found managers willing to forego 123 basis points of projected return to improve tenant affordability, and that willingness rises when the impact is certified and verifiable.

Yet no social impact certification has become the common standard the market can point to: the schemes emerging so far measure different things and remain thinly adopted. Planning commitments routinely go unmeasured, and unverified claims face growing scrutiny.

Cleo Folkes, who leads Thrive’s real estate proposition, explains what credible social impact data looks like, why independent validation matters, and how lifecycle measurement lets assets prove the value they create.

Real estate has money on the table for social impact

Real estate has money on the table for social impact. What it lacks is a reason to believe the numbers.

That is the conclusion Cleo Folkes draws from research published by EPRA, the European Public Real Estate Association: Disentangling Social Impact Ambitions, by Dirk Brounen and Martijn Stroom of Maastricht University:

• The researchers asked European real estate financial and sustainability managers to consider a residential investment promising an 8.75% equity return against a 7.00% requirement, then asked how much of that projection they would give up to materially improve the affordability of their tenants.
• The average answer was 123 basis points.
• The managers surveyed would accept 7.52%, still clear of their required return, in exchange for concrete, demonstrable social impact.

One caveat: the researchers aimed for more than 100 respondents but closed with 25, a small but senior sample, split 60/40 between financial and sustainability managers.

The signal matches wider evidence, though. Knight Frank found that 76% of investors consider social factors material to investment decisions while only 48% actively measure them.

Within that sample, the details surprised even Cleo.

“You would have thought younger people would be willing to forego more than older people. No. It’s actually the older, and more senior people.”

Financial managers, not sustainability managers, proved willing to give up the most. The appetite for impact sits closer to the money than the sector tends to assume.

So if the will is there, what is missing?

What “Certification” is Really Asking for

The study’s most useful finding is about trust. Two things decided how much return managers would give up:

• The credibility of who vouches for the impact before the money is committed

Managers who put more trust in an outside certificate than in their firm’s own claims accepted lower returns, and lower still when the certificate described the same kind of impact the investment was designed to create.

• Whether the impact can be checked after the event

The authors conclude that investors accept the trade more readily “if the results can be verified”. A certificate also does a practical job, the authors observe. It helps a manager explain the lower return to their own investors, because it speaks for the social half of the deal.

There is a catch, and Cleo puts it plainly.

“No impact certification has really established itself for portfolios. A few are emerging, but none is yet the standard, and none does what the investors actually meant, which is a third party putting their seal of approval on there, as a higher authority.”

The Current Landscape for Real Estate

Look at what has emerged so far and the gap is clear. Current schemes measure different things: one certifies the equity invested in individual impact projects, another scores individual assets against metrics designed for procurement, and a third is a health-led certification that frames its value in returns.

Each counts in its own currency, so an investor cannot use them to compare two managers like for like. The same problem sits inside most portfolios: when every asset counts differently, in different formats and systems, the numbers cannot be added together, let alone rolled up into the handful of figures a board or a fund report asks for. That holds across borders as much as across a domestic estate. On a common footing the arithmetic works, and an asset, fund or annual figure traces back to the playground, air quality improvement or meanwhile-use lease that produced it.

They are also young and thinly adopted; the earliest made its first award in 2024, so it is unlikely that many of the study’s respondents had completed any of them.

And none yet offers what the survey answers imply investors are picturing: an independently governed, portfolio-level, auditable seal on the social impact an asset delivers across its life. The demand is real. The standard is not there yet. Existence is not recognition.

That reading makes the research more interesting. It is not about certificates at all. It is about where confidence comes from when the thing being measured is as intangible as social impact.

“A trusted third party would mean data that’s in a comprehensive structure. It would typically involve some level of validation and assurance for it to be able to be trusted. A lot of this is implied and never really said out loud.”

The sector already shows what it trusts: independent asset-level schemes such as GRESB and BREEAM are held in high regard precisely because they bring independence, governance and benchmarking, and help the sector improve.

Cleo has a blunter test, from her years measuring social value for institutional investors.

“Can it ‘stand up in court’? That’s what real estate wants from its data. They want a third party delivering this data, because a third party gives this credibility.”

Building Credibility from the Data Up in Real Estate

If there is no recognised seal of approval to borrow, credibility has to be built into the data itself: how it is collected, how it is structured, and who is prepared to stand behind it. None of that happens overnight, but it is a journey rather than a leap.

“Stage one is get data. Stage two is improve it. And Stage three is validation.”

For an organisation just starting out, capturing what it already does matters more than perfecting it. Most of the data already exists: in asset and property management platforms, HR and finance systems, and contractor and managing agent returns. It’s ready to be pulled in by API, scheduled feed or mapped upload. Earlier work is not lost, either. Results held in a previous framework or a spreadsheet can be brought across and restated on a consistent basis. That way, a change of method still shows year-on-year improvement. What determines urgency is accountability.

“Validation is important when you have accountability, but there are different levels. If you are a listed company, your accountability, and the scrutiny that comes along with it, is a lot greater.”

Listed businesses have their data audited as a matter of course. LP questionnaires, GRESB submissions and regulators challenging loose social language in fund documents all raise the bar further. The closer an organisation sits to that scrutiny, the sooner independently checked data stops being optional.

Cleo also observes that real estate’s social value maturity is concentrated at each end of the scale. Most organisations sit at the immature end, a few are extremely mature, and there is little in between. The immature end loves monetised proxy values because they make impact tangible and comparable. The mature end warns against what Cleo calls proxy value inflation: a big headline number that means nothing on its own. Both are right. Numbers without a story invite suspicion, and stories without numbers invite challenge. Credible reporting pairs them.

The Promises Nobody Checks

If trust in investor reporting is where validation is decided, planning is where its absence is most visible.

Developers make detailed social commitments to win consent: green space, local employment, community facilities, affordable rent or homes. These promises are weighed by planning committees and are often decisive. What happens afterwards is another matter. Cleo was recently interviewed by an academic researching exactly this for the Royal Town Planning Institute. He asked whether what is promised during planning is measured once an asset is in use. Her answer was blunt: mostly, no.

There are honourable exceptions. Westfield committed to a proportion of local employment at one of its London shopping centres, measures it, and reports it to the council. But Cleo also points to a major London regeneration scheme where the green space promised through planning never materialised.

“None of it has been delivered. No one is measuring. No one is following up. And yes, they should.”

The failure is rarely bad faith. It is missing infrastructure. “They haven’t had the tools to do this,” she says. Planning teams promise, construction teams build, operations teams inherit, and nothing carries the commitment across those handovers. Even where obligations are contractual, through Section 106 agreements in England and Wales or Section 75 in Scotland, delivery should be evidenced honestly: measured, shown, and tagged as obligation rather than claimed as additional social value.

Handled well, quantified social value changes the planning conversation itself. Where a scheme is contested, being able to show what is at stake, the value of two hundred extra affordable homes weighed against a height constraint, for example, gives committees something concrete to balance. And the argument runs both ways: there is a strong case for local authorities to track delivery on planning commitments exactly as commissioning authorities now track social value from their suppliers.

Closing the Loop

This is the gap Thrive’s new Real Estate Metrics were built to close. As Cleo says:

“We are that layer of trustworthiness.”

The 19 place-based metrics sit within the independently governed Impact Evaluation Standard and cover what communities and occupiers actually experience: affordable homes created, new public realm and playgrounds, community facilities, meanwhile use of vacant space, and workplace wellbeing measures such as indoor air quality, natural light and thermal comfort. Used at design and planning stage, they estimate the value a scheme will create. Used in operation, they evidence what has been delivered, year after year: in Cleo’s words, “a social value passport over the whole asset lifecycle”. Because both uses draw on the same metrics, the design-stage estimate becomes the baseline the occupied asset is measured against, and the template for the next scheme. The thinking is done once.

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The numbers are built to survive scrutiny. Many of the proxy values derive from peer-reviewed willingness-to-pay research, such as what occupiers will pay more in rent for clean air, daylight or thermal comfort, adjusted and converted into published values per square metre per year. That is the level of workings a sustainability team can defend to an auditor, which is exactly the point. It also changes what happens when someone asks. Because the data is already structured and valued, the figure exists before the request arrives, workings attached: an investor question, a bid deadline or a board paper means pulling the number, not starting a fortnight of emails.

“It’s always easy to estimate something. Actually measuring it, actually getting the data, is always harder. But that’s where the real value is. You said you were going to do that. Are you actually doing it, or are you doing more? That’s where real social value kicks in.”

Measured this way, the everyday social value an asset generates, day in, day out, for the people who live in and work in or around it and pass through it, dwarfs the occasional volunteering day that has traditionally filled the social pages of an ESG report. An asset is typically in use for 25 years or more. The value grows over the years, as does the available evidence.

Where Trust Comes From

The market is willing to reward social impact where someone credible stands behind the data. No certification yet holds that authority, so the sector’s answer, for now, has to be built from the data up: measured credibly across the asset lifecycle, validated independently, and honest about what was promised and what was delivered. Planning is where that credibility gap is most exposed, and the asset lifecycle is where the richest defensible story is waiting to be told. The organisations that connect the two will be the ones investors, planners and communities choose to believe.

To explore what defensible social impact measurement looks like across the asset lifecycle, download Thrive’s data quality in real estate white paper.

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