I haven’t had such a packed week since I joined Thrive as Lead Consultant for Real Assets last year!
In the final days of March I:
● Ran a workshop with the Association for Rental Living on social value benchmarking and methodology (26/3/25)
● Took part in a Thrive roundtable with investors on the subject of holistic social value measurement in real estate, chaired by Vivienne King (27/3/25)
● Organised and took part in a Society of Property Researchers/Investment Property Forum webinar, entitled “Moving towards a holistic view on social value impact” (31/3/25)
Want to find out what other events are happening? Catch up on our events page.
Why so much activity?
The answer is simple.
As a 30-year veteran of property and social value, I can see a pressing need and growing demand throughout the real estate sector to bring the social pillar of ESG up to the same standards of transparency and rigour as have been established for environmental sustainability.
Real estate has a huge impact on the lives of people and the planet.
My career has taken in many different areas of real estate, including consultancy, investment, and management. I’ve worked alongside private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and large investment firms.
I think it’s fair to say that today, the contribution that our sector can make towards achieving Net Zero is almost universally understood. After all, worldwide, the built environment is responsible for around 42% of all carbon emissions.
But the effect it exerts on the communities and individuals at and around real estate and infrastructure assets is no less significant.
And yet reporting, measurement, data quality, and assurance in this space are far less mature.
It’s a field I have explored in detail before, playing a key role in creating the world’s first social housing index when I was at MSCI – work I am deeply proud of.
The need to balance purpose and profit is widely recognised as best practice, but the challenge remains – as in many other sectors – how to make the leap from talking about inputs to talking about outcomes, holistically.
That’s what we’ve been doing in these sessions, and I am seeing five major requirements for solving real estate’s challenge:
- The need for standardisation
- The need for flexibility
- The need for any framework to accommodate different levels of maturity and capacity
- The need to facilitate storytelling and encourage community engagement
- The need to encompass a range of different reporting requirements
In my next blog, I’ll dig into each of these in turn.
Cleo Folkes
Lead Consultant Real Assets More articles by Cleo >
